


Turnabout

by HappilyShanghaied



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: ATCU sketchiness, Absinthe, Accidental Voyeurism, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Jemma Simmons, BAMF Leo Fitz, Bobbi is everybody's big sister, Canon Compliant, Casual Sex, Fitz dates a chick named Switchblade, Hunter being an amazing wingman, Lincoln/Fitz BroTp, Mack/Joey background romance, POV Jemma Simmons, POV Leo Fitz, Pigs Fly, Wall Sex, blowjob, but also canon divergent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-04-28 18:20:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5100953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappilyShanghaied/pseuds/HappilyShanghaied
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Canon compliant until S03E05</p><p>The bar was dingy, rough, and filled with the wrong sort of people. It was the kind of place Hunter bragged about going but always refused to take Fitz, claiming his boyish looks would ruin Hunter's street cred. At this point, Fitz probably looked as surly and dangerous as the next guy. He certainly felt that way inside.</p><p>The seats of the red pleather bar stools - cracked from age and overuse - jutted into the backs of Fitz's thighs through his dark wash jeans. It was dire inside, but it matched Fitz's mood perfectly.</p><p>He didn't even bother looking at what they had on tap, he just wanted to forget his own name. And especially hers. "I'll have an ale."</p><p>"No, you won't." Hunter walked behind the bar like it was his own kitchen and grabbed a bottle of absinthe from the hidden rack below. "Tonight, we chase the green fairy."</p><p>Mack exhaled loudly and slapped a hand on Fitz's thigh. "Better buckle up, Turbo. It's about to get bumpy."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fitz drowns his sorrows in absinthe and ladies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want Fitz to be happy and to get laid, because the boy deserves a good day. If Simmons gets jealous and realizes she needs to step up her game, I'm good with that. Either way, this is both Simmons and Fitz positive. No vilification will occur here. 
> 
> This hasn't been beta'd so please forgive any mistakes!
> 
> Don't kill me.

Fitz sat on the couch in the middle of the common room, head bracketed on his fists. "She says his name is Will."

Bobbi exchanged a loaded look with Hunter and lifted her chin. "Will _what_?"

"Will Daniels." The name tasted bitter on his tongue, but he would have to just swallow it down, much like everything else.

Next to his legs on the floor, Daisy sat down, plonked her laptop on the coffee table and flipped it open. "Town? Date of birth?"

"I don't know and I don't know." Fitz pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

He honestly didn't give a shit who this guy was. In fact, he'd almost be happier not knowing. The only thing that really mattered was that Jemma wanted to be with the guy and not with him. He couldn't control that, no matter what this man's name turned out to be.

"Well, what do you know about him?" Bobbi expression was frighteningly unreadable, which is how Fitz knew this was going to get ugly if it went on much longer.

"He worked for NASA, supposedly," Mack offered, smirking, like he barely believed the claim. "Got stranded in 2001."

"His space odyssey began in 2001? Well, isn't that ironic? Should be simple enough to check." Daisy's hands flew across the keys in a soothing rhythm of taps and slides. The computer version of morse code. "Nope. Nothing in NASA's database came up under a 'William Daniels'. I expanded the search to different nicknames and spellings, but nada. He's a ghost."

"I knew this was bollocks!" Hunter slammed the neck of a beer bottle down on the edge of the bar, popping the top off. "A fucking scheister, he is."

He extended the beer to Fitz, who barely had the energy to wave it away.

"Well if he is lying about who he is, shouldn't take me more than five minutes to shake the truth out of him when he gets here." The furrow between May's brows was deeper than usual. " _If_ he gets here."

Fitz's traitorous heart skipped a beat at the thought that the rescue might fail. But then he remembered Jemma's tear-stained face and cursed his selfishness. She wanted the other guy, not him. And despite how much he loved her, Fitz didn't want to get her by default. It would have to be an active choice or no choice at all.

"Yeah, and if he is a liar, it shouldn't take me more than five minutes to kick his bloody teeth in." Hunter smiled, maliciously, and took a long sip of beer.

Fitz had never felt more loved and unloved at the same time. "Jemma says he was on some - some kind of c-covert mission. Strictly off the books."

Hunter balked. "Convenient, innit?"

"Well," Bobbi shot Fitz a sad smile. "He wouldn't be the first person working off the books. I guess anything is possible."

"Nah. This is total bullshit and you all know it." Hunter threw his beer cap against the side of the garbage can, where it ricocheted onto the floor beside it. "They're the only two people left on the planet? What are the odds of that? It's all very pat, if you ask me."

Fitz's body was numb, slightly cold, and limbs so very heavy. He wondered if this was what it felt like to be in space.

"It doesn't matter who he is," he said, quietly. "She wants him brought home."

Hunter leveled him with a glare. "And what do you want, mate?"

"I want her to be happy." Fitz bit his bottom lip, trying to get the circulation back. "So, it doesn't matter if his name is Will or if he's really an astronaut. She wants him here and so that's what I'm gonna do."

Like the slow, sad decent of a coffin lid, Daisy closed her laptop shut. "That's that, then. I guess." She pulled herself into the couch next to Fitz and wrapped her arms around his waist, holding him close. "This sucks so much."

Fitz laughed, low and bitter. "I - I keep telling myself that I should be happy she wasn't there alone - and I am, of course I am - but this - I never in a million years expected this."

May folded her arms and struggled to keep her usual mask of calm, which had been tested to the limit over the last few days, beginning with Andrew's murder. "NASA, huh? Turns out I happen to know of a woman who used to work at NASA. Would've been around that time, too."

Fitz winced, not wanting to bother May with trifles during her time of mourning. "You don't have to--"

"Yes, I do." She shut him down with a look. "Jemma is still a member of this team and he's still an unknown entity. I'm not about to allow another wolf dneak its way into the hen house."

Not leaving it up for further debate, May left the room, boots clacking against the wooden floor.

"Do you want to watch one of those really crappy British tv shows you love?" Daisy stroked the side of Fitz's arm. "The ones with all the cheap science fiction effects?"

"That would be all of them, Daisy Duke." Hunter plopped himself on the other side of Fitz, slapping a rhythm out on the tops of his own thighs.

"We could get really, _really_ drunk first?" She smiled coyly at Fitz, tugging on his sleeve like a cat. "I promise I won't even talk over the action. Much."

Mack tried his best to seem upbeat, but he - of all people - knew what a crushing blow this was for Fitz. "Wouldn't mind cracking open that bottle of mezcal we got during our last mission in the Yucatan."

Fitz shook his head. "Look, I appreciate what you're all trying to do, but I'm fine."

"Well, that's a load of horse shit." Bobbi laughed. "Here's an idea: why don't we skip all of the pretense and you boys take Fitzy out tonight and get him blindingly drunk?"

Hunter shrugged and looked at Mack. "I'm game."

Mack nodded. "Sounds like a solid plan."

Fitz closed his eyes and let his head drop back onto the couch cushion. "Do I get a say in this?"

Bobbi smiled. "Nope."

* * *

 

The bar was dingy, rough, and filled with the wrong sort of people. It was the kind of place Hunter bragged about going but always refused to take Fitz, claiming his boyish looks would ruin Hunter's street cred. At this point, Fitz probably looked as surly and dangerous as the next guy. He certainly felt that way inside.

The seats of the red pleather bar stools - cracked from age and overuse - jutted into the backs of Fitz's thighs through his dark wash jeans. It was dire inside, but it matched Fitz's mood perfectly.

He didn't even bother looking at what they had on tap, he just wanted to forget his own name. And especially hers. "I'll have an ale."

"No, you won't." Hunter walked behind the bar like it was his own kitchen and grabbed a bottle of absinthe from the hidden rack below. "Tonight, we chase the green fairy."

Mack exhaled loudly and slapped a hand on Fitz's thigh. "Better buckle up, Turbo. It's about to get bumpy."

Hunter hadn't even finished pouring the first round of shots before Fitz brought his to his lips and downed it in one go.

"Oy, slow down. This is a sipping beverage, moron. You're gonna end up with a tube down your stomach if you keep that up."

Fitz pushed his glass forward and smiled, darkly. "Keep them coming."

* * *

 

The hours passed in a Gaussian blur, and the next time Fitz came up for air, he was wedged into a sticky booth in the back of the bar, sandwiched between two attractive ladies, both who seemed far too classy for this place (he'd learn later, they were friends of Bobbi's from the military).

"...and the thing is, yeah? We had fuck all on us as far as weapons went," Hunter said, adding his usual vocal flourish. "Just a little C4, a pack of gum and sawdust."

The younger, angelic-looking woman with wide blue eyes and wavy blond hair, turned to Fitz. "What did you do?"

Fitz's mouth dropped open to speak, but he'd forgotten what they were talking about. Hunter had gone through at least five stories - most only marginally true - of Fitz's supposed heroism and genius, and it was hard for Fitz to keep track of all of them.

He was happy they were mostly fictional. Many of his more fantastic missions hadn't been solo and if he had to think of Jemma tonight, working diligently by his side, he might crack.

"What he did," Hunter raised his voice dramatically, "was fucking MacGuyver that shit. Fitz made a fucking bomb out of a fucking apple!"

The woman with the shorter, brown hair looked at Mack, quizzically. "Did he say a bong?"

Hunter rolled his eyes. "No love, bomb. Keep up."

Fitz lifted his glass to his lips, only to find it was empty. "It was a vehicle. The bomb was in the apple, not made from the apple. You could call it a Trojan apple."

Hunter made a 'WTF' face at Mack, who laughed as he looked fondly over at Fitz.

"You used the bomb as a delivery system?" The Angel smiled widely. "That's absolutely brilliant."

Fitz rested his glass on its edge and smirked. "Yes, it bloody was. By the time they'd realized it was on the dinner table--" he made a large explosion sound, complete with hand gestures.

The entire group erupted into laughter.

Maybe he could get through this, after all.

* * *

 

The door to Fitz's state room crashed up open as he tumbled against it, the blonde woman from the bar in his arms.

"Wow. This plane is really goddamn nice," she said, reaching down to unzip his fly with no preamble. They both knew why she was there, so why try to dress it up? "Your boss must be in charge of some seriously dark ops."

His head hit the light switch - illuminating the room - as hot breath ghosted across his neck. "If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

"Better close the door then." She pressed her lips against his, soft and wet, and Fitz bloomed under the attention. "Wouldn't want you to get caught."

He’d hardly used his hands for anything but tech in the last few years, but the soft swell of her bottom was a nice weight in his palms and he pulled her tightly against his body. "Leave it open."

"Kinky, huh?" She smiled - he'd apparently said exactly the right thing - and sank to her knees. "It's always the ones you least suspect."

She pulled him free of his jeans and licked slowly from the root. "How do you want it? Slow and sensual or quick and dirty?"

"Dirty," he gasped, as she took him entirely into her mouth in one go. "Fucking hell."

His stammer was magically gone - the absinthe had taken care of that - and in its place was a mouth so salty even he didn't recognize what was coming out of it.

She sucked him hard at a punishing speed, barely allowing him a moment to adjust.

His fingertips grazed the top of her hair, then balled into fists that he banged flat against his open door. This might be a one-off, but he wasn't going to be ungentlemanly about it.

"You can grab my hair," she said, taking him in her hand for a moment, "that's kind of the point of quick and dirty."

Fitz let his hands rest on the top of her head, then twisted his fingers into her flaxen curls as she she picked up the speed, adding her mouth back into the act.

"God. Fuck." Fitz squeezed his eyes shut and panted hard, trying to hold off as long as possible. The alcohol had taken the edge off - _thankfully_ \- but it had been far too long since he'd indulged himself like this.

He'd been sexually active at university and sci-ops academy, where being the smartest man in the room was often an aphrodisiac for intelligent girls, but he hadn't touched a woman like this since joining up with Coulson's SHIELD.

He told himself if was because they were never in one place, always too busy, but deep down he knew the truth. He had harbored too many silly romantic notions of intimacies he only wanted to share with Jemma.

Now that those possibilities were gone, this was all he was left with.

"Fuck yes!" He shouted a little too loud, but he was too drunk to care.

Fitz gripped the blonde’s hair, tugging lightly, and she moaned her approval around him.

"I'm - I'm gonna--" It was at that moment he chose to open his eyes, only to find Jemma staring back at him from the end of the hall, hair wet and towel slung casually over her arm.

She was frozen there, as if glued in place. On her face was an expression of raw horror and shame with a touch of something he couldn't identify mixed in.

They locked eyes, just as he lost his control and spilled down the blonde's throat.

Fitz took a ragged breath and stared back at Jemma. Defiantly.

"My turn," the blonde said, rising to her feet, as she tucked him back into his pants.

He took one last look at Jemma and shut the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I know, nobody loves OC smut. I tried to keep it vague-ish. 
> 
> I promise though, Fitz only has eyes for Jemma.
> 
> If you have the time, please sound off in the comments and let me know what you think - your feedback is very much appreciated! Thanks for reading.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma's POV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for all of the feedback. As per your requests, here's the next segment of the fic.
> 
> PS - still no beta, so pardon any mistakes.

 

Jemma tripped over her towel as she hurried to her room, falling hard against the metal doorjam of her bedroom door. "Dammit!"

She was sure she could feel blood welling at the site of the scrape, but she wouldn't stop to check, too desperate to get into the safety of her room as quickly as possible.

Once the door was shut and locked, she leaned her head against it and let out a silent sob.

Her arm was slashed and painful, as good an excuse to cry as any. At least, that what she told herself. It definitely had nothing to do with the spectacle she'd just witnessed in the hall.

It wasn't the first time she'd seen Fitz with a woman - well - admittedly, not like this. They'd gone to plenty of parties together in their youth, and he was certainly no stranger to making out with cute girls in dark corridors.

But this was not an innocent make out session. This was...different.

Jemma examined her arm and winced at the amount of blood weeping from her wound. She wouldn't need stitches, but the skin was torn and broken. There would likely be a scar.

She methodically wrapped the towel around her forearm and then compressed it with her other hand to stave off the bleeding, inhaling sharply at the first shock of pain.

After six months of feeling almost nothing at all, it was as if all of her receptors had woken up at once, both agonizing and beautiful at the same time.

Her mind drifted to a pair of capable hands, twisting into a mop of blonde hair.

She pressed the wound so hard she hissed.

Even before the medpod, Jemma often wondered what Fitz might be like in bed. But, she couldn't bring herself to think of him that way, wouldn't allow those thoughts to take hold for fear that they'd metastasize and grow.

They were best friends. He knew more about the way her mind worked than her parents did. Maybe even better than she, herself, did? She couldn't risk losing all of that over a passing curiosity.

Having already claimed ownership to half his thoughts (and he hers), did she really need a physical relationship with him in order to feel closer? There was already no space left between them. They had reached a level of intimacy that transcended the carnal.

So she packed those inconvenient thoughts into a box and hid them away forever. Or ten years, at least, until he'd found her hiding spot and dragged them out into the light.

Despite her best efforts, Jemma couldn't stop thinking about the way Fitz looked in the hallway; head rolled back, brow glistening with sweat, his Adam's apple bobbing as he fell apart in front of her.

It was that moment she realized she didn't - in fact - know everything about Leo Fitz. And now, she probably never would.

* * *

 

Jemma arrived at the lab early, hoping to be engrossed in a project by the time he came in. It would be less awkward that way. Having something to occupy herself with to avoid the elephant in the room.

Apparently, she wasn't the only one who had that same thought, because by the time she got there, Fitz was bent over a magnesium block, laser-soldering iron in hand and safety goggles firmly in place.

She had no idea what to say or where to look. Luckily, Fitz had no such problem.

"Morning. I brought you earl grey," he mumbled. 

Still focused on his project, he waved a hand toward the counter where he'd left the tea.

A hint of milk. No sugar. Extra strong. He always got it exactly right.

She lifted the mug to her nose and let the scent of bergamot soothe her nerves. "Thank you."

"Ta." He squinted his eyes and released a beam of red light onto the long iron bar he held in his hands.

The same hands that roughly grabbed fistfuls of hair last night as a woman brought him off, were now performing microsurgery on a hunk of metal.

He abruptly put the laser down and shook out his left hand, taking a moment to massage it with his right.

"Metacarpals still giving you trouble?" She crossed the room to pull a fresh lab coat from the closet rack. "We have a TENS machine in the clinic that could help with that."

He shook his head. "It's fine. Sometimes it still seizes up from overuse, but I know my limits now."

She took a closer look at his project. "What are you working on?"

"A giant tuning fork, if you can believe." An enthusiastic smile appeared on Fitz's face, and for a minute, she could almost pretend things were how they used to be. "The monolith needs to vibrate at a certain frequency in order to open. Daisy held it open last time when I went to - to get you."

That was quite a euphemism. He made it sound like he'd just given her a ride home from work.

Jemma stepped a little closer, careful not to crowd him. "Why can't she just do it again?"

Fitz's smile dropped off, replaced by a weary expression. "It nearly killed her. She wasn't - wasn't expecting me to jump into the portal. We were only meant to keep it open long enough to put a probe in."

Her forehead creased. "You hadn't planned on jumping in after me?"

"Oh, _I'd_ planned on jumping, they just didn't know that ahead of time." He shrugged, like risking his life by throwing himself into an unexplored worm hole was no big deal. "They'd never agreed to it."

"I hadn't known."

"Daisy was having trouble keeping it open, even for a short time..." Fitz's speech dropped off with a sigh. "It was wrong of me to put her in danger like that. But what the hell else was I gonna do? It might've been my last shot to get you home. You really should thank her for that, by the way."

"I will." Jemma cleared her throat and busied herself with tugging on the lab coat. "Okay, so you're trying to replicate the frequency by using a tuning fork? How will you know if it's accurate?"

"It's kind of a rudimentary concept right now, but..." Fitz reached for a jar of silvery black rocks and handed them to her. "Hold this."

He then took the tuning fork and struck it against the edge of the table.

The rocks instantly liquified.

"My god, Fitz," Jemma's entire face lit up at the discovery. "That's brilliant innovation!"

He took the space rocks back from her and tucked them into the crook of his arm, like a beloved pet. "It's just a simple tuning fork. And I'm going to have to make one much much bigger if we're going to be able to use it to get the portal open again. It would probably require an - an electronic component or a - an--"

"Amplifier?"

He rubbed the top of the jar with his palm and smiled sadly. "Yeah. That."

They stood in uncomfortable silence for what felt like an eternity, before both began speaking at the same time.

"Fitz, I--" 

"Jemma, I'm--"

They looked at each other and sighed.

"I think we both know what the other is going to say," she said, hesitantly, her heart beating in her chest like a snare drum. "So maybe we can--"

"Skip it?" He pulled the goggles from his face to get a better look at her.

That wasn't at all what she was about to say.

Her nose wrinkled. "It's incredibly awkward between us, isn't it? Not just because of..." She waved her hand to fill in the rest of the sentence.

Fitz mimicked her hand motion. "That could mean a lot of different things, Jem. But yeah, I agree. Let's just keep things professional between us."

It felt like a punch to the gut, but what did she expect? He'd spent six months thinking of nothing but her, and she'd spent much of that same time...

"Can we really do that, though?" Her attempt at a smile came off more like a grimace. "After everything we've been through?"

He shrugged, his expression so lost it made him looks years younger. "I'm willing to try if you are."

"I - I don't--"

"I need you to try, Jemma." His eyes glowed unnaturally blue under the fluorescent lights. "For me."

"Oh." She nodded, not trusting herself not to cry.

It was selfish of her to want to keep him close, having broken him twice now. She owed him his space.

 

* * *

 

 

The rest of the day had gone as expected. Fitz was cordial, as he always was to Jemma, but not a shade more than necessary.

They worked on their projects, just as they'd always done, but the extraneous talking was kept to a minimum.

Will was gone and she missed him terribly, especially having no idea if he was even safe.

She kept hearing that gunshot in her sleep, echoing in her head, and wondered whether he'd slain the beast or used that last round on himself. The idea of him lying there in that barren wasteland, with no one to even bury him or mourn, made her physically ill.

But she also missed Fitz. The empty space he used to fill inside of her ached with his absence. And, the worst part about it was that he wasn't on a planet in another galaxy or even lost to her in a coma. He was right there - ten feet away - healthy and whole.

She was bereft.

Fitz shrugged off his lab coat, revealing a pale blue button down underneath tucked into a pair of fitted jeans. Apparently, some time in the thousands of hours since she'd been gone, he'd grown into an adult, complete with a shiny new wardrobe.

"You look really nice," she heard herself say, before she could stop it.

"I'm sorry - what?" Fitz was mildly distracted as smoothed down the wrinkles on front of his shirt. 

Her eyes followed the motion of his hands.

She tried not to let herself wonder who he'd gotten dressed up for.

"I said that's a nice shirt." Jemma was thankful for the opportunity to alter her comment to something more safe. "Matches your eyes."

Ugh. Why couldn't she stop talking?

"That's what Bobbi told me when she made me buy it."

Jemma laughed, unable to stop picturing what that shopping trip might have entailed. "Bobbi took you shopping for clothes? I've been trying to do that for ages, but you never let me."

Fitz smiled softly at his shoes. "I'd been wearing a bathrobe and beard around the lab like 'The Dude' for a straight week, and she finally walked up to me and said 'Right, we're off to the store.' Wouldn't take no for an answer."

"You wore a bathrobe around the lab? I don't have to tell you how many fire regulations that breaks, Leo, not to mention the lack of sanitation."

"Sanitation wasn't a high priority for me at the time." 

Every new detail she learned about when she was away only made her feel worse.

The world continuing to spin on without her in it was a strange concept. Time on the blue planet was like a form of suspended animation, always night, never changing. She'd just forgotten it wasn't that way for those on the outside, too.

"Well, she did a cracking job, though I wouldn't have minded seeing what you looked like with a beard."

He ruffled a hand through his hair, mussing his curls. "Daisy said it was sexy, Bobbi thought so too. Mack told me I looked like a reclusive author living in Key West. Hunter would only address me as 'neck beard' for a week, until Bobbi made him stop."

God, she'd missed so much time. "What did you think?"

"If I'm being honest, I didn't think anything at all. The last six months have kind of been a blur for me." Fitz absently teased at the generous dusting of stubble that seemed to perennially live on his face these days.

Jemma bit back a wave of emotion. "We've both had a rough go of it."

He scrubbed a hand over his face and began to laugh, nervously. "We said we weren't going to do this."

"Don't you think we need to talk, sometime?"

His eyes peeped through his fingers. "No?"

"We don't have to do it alone." She took a small step forward and his body froze. "Maybe we could talk to somebody together? Perhaps a professional?"

Fitz balked, dropping his hands to his hips and leaned in. "Like a couples' therapist?"

"I don't know? Yes!" Her pulse began to pick up again and she could feel herself growing more desperate. "There has to be a therapist who specializes in resolving issues between friends."

Her best friend was disappearing in front of her, like an apparition in the process of crossing over to the other side. Except that he was taking half of her with him.

"That's not - not how friendship works, Jemma." His squeezed his eyes shut again and cursed under his breath. When he reopened them to look at her, they were filled with tears. "When friends have issues big enough that they require a therapist, they just stop being friends. That's what people do."

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Fitz..."

"I can't do this right now." He tossed his lab coat onto the desk in a heap and headed for the door.

* * *

 

Coulson passed Fitz on his way into the lab and did a double-take, before turning to Jemma. "Last time I saw a guy run out of a room that fast he'd just pissed off Bruce Banner. And yeah, it was Tony."

Jemma wiped the tears from her cheeks with her lab coat sleeves and put on the brightest smile she could manage. "Just a few road bumps, sir, nothing to worry about."

"Definitely looks like it got a little bumpy in here." He gestured to Fitz's lab coat, which had fallen to the floor. "Do you think you guys are going to be able to work this thing out?"

Her instinct was to cover things up and think positively, push aside how she was feeling as she always did when her life was in turmoil. Optimism used to be second nature to her. Not anymore. Not since Planet Hell.

And frankly, she was too tired to care.

"Honestly?" Jemma tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "I don't know."

Coulson raised an eyebrow. It obviously wasn't the answer he was expecting. "That doesn't inspire too much confidence."

She lifted the tuning fork where Fitz left it on the counter and pressed the ends of the cold metal into her fingertips. "Whenever I've had a problem this big to fix, I've usually turned to Fitz for help. Fairly certain he hates my guts now."

Coulson sank onto a stool and looked at her like she was cognitively impaired. "Guys don't throw themselves into worm holes for women they hate."

"Yes, but--"

"He would have done it regardless of how you felt about him. And he's happy you're here, regardless of how you feel about him, now. That's just who he is."

She pressed the fork into her skin harder. Maybe the external pain might distract from the pain she was feeling inside? "That doesn't mean I haven't hurt him deeply."

"No. But you can't help how you feel."

"I don't know how I feel."

Coulson let out a low whistle. "That's sticky."

She laughed. "That's one word for it."

"He's trying to let you go, Jemma. Be patient with him, he'll get there." Phil placed a paternal grip on her shoulder. "Just figure it out before you two burn the lab down."

She nodded. "Will do."

"Oh, and Simmons..." Coulson stopped as he reached the laboratory door, "He's not the only one who has to learn to let go."

She and Fitz had practically grown up together, intertwining over the years like neighboring sapling trees, fusing into one strong trunk. The only way to separate something like that would be to chop the whole thing down.

"I don't know if I can do that," she said to herself, as the lab door slid closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whelp. That was angsty.
> 
> Please let me know if I should continue with this or if you've had your fill. Your feedback has been awesome. Thank you so much!
> 
> PS - for some random reason this fic has made me turn Lincoln & Fitz into a BroTp. I have no idea what came over me, but I hope you're okay with it...because it's happening.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fitz learns to make new friends, Jemma and Fitz have some lab fun together, and inhuman intrigue starts...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still un-beta'd, so if I use the same word three times in one sentence, I've only myself to blame.
> 
> This is a longer one, so settle in. Also, you might want to hand wave the science, because that's kind of what I did :)

The next two weeks for Fitz passed much like the last two: at a bar.

He had seen more action in the last month than he had the entire time he'd been at the academy, but it was barely helping.

He knew if he could just apply the theory of probability to his social life, he was bound to find a woman to take his mind off Jemma. Statistically, that was true. Of course, nobody would get all of his jokes or be as good of a person, but there had to be plenty of women out there who would be good enough.

Meanwhile, the women he fooled around with might have helped him forget during the act, but the second they were out the door, his thoughts returned to his best friend. And he felt worse than ever.

Still, if he had to date his way across the entire globe to forget her, he would do it. He had to try. If not for himself, then for her.

Jemma wanted so badly for things to 'be normal' but it would be impossible for Fitz be with her at all - everyday, loving her - if he didn't distract himself elsewhere. Especially now, as he was close to finishing the portal rebuild.

Will would arrive soon enough, and Fitz had to prepare himself, toughen up. The doomsday clock had been set, and there was nothing he could do but hunker down and wait for the enviable to roll over him like a sandstorm, leaving him dizzy and raw.

Sitting in one of the back booths, Fitz felt the weight of a person's stare on the nape of his neck. It wasn't subtle, considering the company. If there was one person at the bar who wasn't somehow loosely connected to SHIELD, he would have been amazed. With spies everywhere, it was a sure bet that if you felt like you were being watched, it was intentional.

Hunter gestured to the bar with his chin. "That bird at the bar's been checking you out for the past hour."

"I knew s-somebody was, but..." Fitz turned around so awkwardly he nearly slipped off the chair.

"Smooth." Bobbi laughed and threw a wadded up napkin at Fitz's chest to get him to turn back around. "I'm gonna make a man out of you, yet. You watch."

"Maybe I don't want you to make me into a man?" Fitz threw the napkin back at her, which she effortlessly caught in her hand. "That came out so very wrong."

Bobbi leaned back and propped up her leg up onto Lance's thigh for support as he massaged it for her. "You're doing great Fitzy, but you still have a cloud of sadness hovering around you like static cling."

"Thanks. Is this how you got the handle _Mock_ ingbird?"

"Try living with her, son." As much as Hunter complained, Fitz had yet to see a man more smitten.

"She's still looking at you and she's cute." Bobbi shook her empty tumbler, the last vestiges of amber liquid clinging to the glass. "I could use a refill."

Fitz glanced at the bar and pulled his wallet out. "How about you, Hunter?"

"I wouldn't say no to another pint."

Fitz rose from his chair. "There's a shocker."

"Just flattered by the offer, seeing how you Scots are about money." Hunter downed the last bit of his drink and made an exaggerated quenched noise.

"Untrue! Slander and untrue. Cheap bastard."

Hunter threw his head back and laughed. "You're still getting the round though, yeah?"

"Straight up usury, it is - and yes - obviously I am. You're lucky I have a - have a completely disposable income and no rent to pay. As do we all." Fitz rounded up the empty glasses and dropped them in a wash bin on the way to the bar.

He lifted his finger to signal the bartender - several times - but was completely ignored.

"Sometimes Frank can be a real asshole when he's in a mood." A woman with a black pixie cut and a pair of gamine legs tucked into dirty combat boots, gestured to the bartender. "Need help?"

"Who am I to say no to special treatment?" The combination of alcohol and not having anything to lose seemed to increase Fitz's confidence tenfold.

"Your boobs are too small to get special treatment here, but I think I can at least help score you and your friends a drink." She raised a hand and waved to Bobbi, who held her hand up in return. "The Mockingbird, huh? You sure do run with an interesting crowd, Sci-ops."

"How did you know I was sci-ops?"

She gave him the once over and grinned. "Call it a hunch."

"Fitz." He extended his hand,

"That your ops name, or--?"

"My actual name, sadly."

She smiled brightly and held on to his hand without shaking it. "Nice to meet you, Fitz."

"How about you?"

"Sam. I go by Switchblade, for all the reasons you'd imagine."

Normally, this would be the point in which he made up a science emergency, but going back to the lab wasn't an option tonight. Simmons was pulling a late one.

"That's vaguely...do - uh - do most men find that intimidating? You know, when they try to chat you up?"

"Don't know." She shrugged and leaned in closer. "You tell me."

Fitz blushed furiously. She had been watching him all night, but he never thought she'd be this forward. It was different, but not entirely unwelcome.

* * *

 

The lab used to be a solace for Fitz, the one place where a socially awkward guy who found most people boring could exercise every corner of his brain without judgement. But the past series of unfortunate events changed all of that for him. The aphasia robbed him of his intellectual confidence and now, and now the situation with Jemma had taken all the rest of it.

"Sorry." He rubbed the back of his hands across his tired eyes, stumbling into a stool on the way to his work station.

Jemma looked up from a microscope. "You're in late."

"Is that a problem?" She had never given him a hassle before about sleeping in. They both kept such irregular hours, there was a nonverbal understanding they'd come and go as they pleased.

"No. No - I was just...concerned." She switched out the slides under her lens, fumbling a few times before it snapped into place. "I thought perhaps you were ill."

"Oh, I was. Dear me, tequila is not my friend." Fitz walked to the closet to get a fresh lab coat.

Jemma narrowed her eyes. "Is that the shirt you were wearing yesterday?"

Fitz took a moment to appreciate the clean linen smell from the crisp white jacket before putting it on. "Why? Are you keeping an evidence log?"

"No. Of course not. I just - just remember the shirt is all. It's quite memorable."

Fitz looked down at his cerulean button down as he fastened the coat over it, wondering what she found so memorable about a plain blue dress shirt. "Okay."

Jemma left her station and grabbed a mug off the counter before taking it over to Fitz. "I brought you lapsang oolong. Unfortunately, it's gone cold now."

He stared at the drink in her hands, a slight lag in registering it. "Oh."

"I know it's still your favorite." She took a tense breath and smiled as though she had bad gas pains. "Figured you could probably use the caffeine."

He took it from her hands, his fingers accidentally brushing over hers. "Thank you, Simmons."

She turned to walk away, but then paused, her back still to him. "You can always talk to me, you know. If something's bothering you. You used to be able to tell me everything."

Fitz signed deeply and brought the mug to his lips. The tea was indeed ice cold. "Not everything."

Jemma turned around to face him, looking wrecked. "I just - you go out almost every night nowadays. You didn't used to."

"Yeah, well, I used to be with _you_ every night, and we can't do that anymore, so I'm doing this instead." He gestured to his stubble and messy hair. "And here, I figured you'd applaud my efforts to engage with the proletariat. You were always on me about it."

She absently pulled out her hair band and started to form a new pony tail with her hands, redoing it about three times before she finally secured it. "I am glad, but...I mean - and I know you want to draw some new boundaries between us - but, couldn't we still hang out sometimes? I was gone a long time, and even though things are...with us, it doesn't mean I wasn't thinking of you almost the entire the time I was away."

"Except when you weren't." Fitz swallowed down the ice cold tea in one gulp with a shiver, and an uncomfortable silence followed. Maybe it was the hangover, but he couldn't stop himself from picking at threads and he was past the point of caring.

"You must know..." Jemma's expression pinched up, as if she were trying to stave off tears. "Of all the things I missed about home, Leo, you were the thing I missed the most."

He set his mug down again slowly, using the time to try and to calm his nerves. "And yet, you gave up on me."

"What?" Jemma looked stricken. "I didn't!"

"You did. It's like - like the minute your phone died, your belief in me died with it."

"When my phone died, I'd lost hope of locating the next coordinates. I lost faith in myself, not _you_."

"I never thought you'd give up. But then, that's always been the difference between us, right?" He shrugged and started pulling out his soldering equipment from the nearest cabinet, slapping each piece onto the countertop with unnecessary roughness.

"What you're saying isn't fair!" Jemma snapped, glare now focused to a laser point. "You have no idea what it felt like to be stranded there, always on the precipice of death, not knowing if I'd ever see my loved ones again."

His anger began to thaw. How could he really be mad at her for giving up when he had no idea what she'd been through? Anything one thing she endure was one thing too many. "You're right, I'm being a prat. I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry." She placed a hand over her heart. "I was so alone, Leo, and scared. And I cried for you every night. But then Will came along...and well, he was there and you weren't. I didn't chose him over you, life chose for me."

"You're entitled to choose whomever you want to be with, and I understand the need for companionship..." He hated how the tone of his voice turned harsh and low whenever the topic turned to Will. "But - but that's not what this is. You're in love with him, you've said so yourself."

"Yes, but it's different. He doesn't--."

"You don't--" Fitz brought his hands to his head. "You - you really don't need to explain it to me. You don't owe me anything."

"I owe you everything!" There were tears streaming down her face, but she didn't seem to notice or care.

He hated to see her cry, especially when he was the one responsible for causing it.

"Look." Fitz fell into the nearest chair and frowned. "You have to know I want to you be happy, even if it's not with me. I'm not mad at you Jemma."

"You act like you hate me." She hiccuped on the last word.

"I could," He shook his head, "I could never, ever hate you. Not you."

"I feel the same way about you." She smiled tentatively. "You know, I kept wishing you could see the strange and unbelievable things I was seeing. It didn't feel real until I could tell you about it, even in a recorded message. And then the phone died and none of it felt real."

A nagging thought settled in his brain. It wasn't the first time he'd had it, but he hadn't the nerve to bring it up before. "Are you sure it was?"

"Well," she shifted uncomfortably on her feet, hands still clench in a death grip, "I didn't mention this before, because I wasn't ready to look any them, but...I took pictures of everything that I could for you, on my phone."

"You what?" Fitz startled so sharply at the news he knocked his tuning fork to the floor with a giant ding, turning all of the jars of space rocks scattered around them to liquid. "Shite."

He tried to pick the fork up again, but ended up kicking it forward by mistake - where it crashed loudly against the floor next to Jemma's converse - prompting the rocks to liquefy again.

"Oh Fitz!" She laughed so hard she had trouble breathing. "I promise I'll show you the pictures if you keep doing that."

"That's - that's fucking data, is what it is, Jem. Mark it down."

She lifted the fork off of the floor and held it out to him. "Experimentation was successful twice. I'll record it."

"Damn right you will. It's genius work."

He moved to grab the tuning fork, but she dropped it before he could get there, letting it clatter to the ground again.

"Oops." She had the glint of mischief in her eyes.

The liquid rock climbed up the sides of the jars in excitement.

"Oh hell." He pointed at the fallen instrument and then at Jemma. "You did that on purpose."

She lifted one of the jars closest to her station and marveled at the sight. "Of course I did, Fitz. Look how flipping cool it is!"

May poked her head inside the lab, stopping only to shout, "Fitzsimmons! Wheels up in five!"

"Raincheck?"

Jemma and Leo locked eyes, laughing like naughty school children as they put away the jars.

* * *

  
Fitz and Jemma sat opposite each other, strapped into the bucket seats that lined the wall.

"Little girl. Aged six. Her parents say she manifested sometime last week, but they didn't realize what it was until now." Daisy was sitting in the copilot' chair scrolling through the tablet, brows bunched up in concentration. "What's her thing? It doesn't say."

"Not exactly sure," May answered, keeping her eyes on the external, infrared sensors. "But whatever it is, she's overheating all of the equipment in her father's factory. Problem is the building is isolated and I can't find anywhere close enough that has enough flat land to put the bird down."

Fitz looked out the window. The giant complex of concrete structures was certainly looming but looked innocuous from above. "How critical?"

"On a scale of one to ten? An eleven." May turned the gears to circle the building once again. "The place goes into automatic lockdown mode if there's a crack anywhere in the foundation. Nobody can get in or out."

Fitz looked at Jemma, whose expression mirrored his own.

"Have they located the site of the fracture?" She asked.

May remained stoic, as usual. "No. It doesn't seem to have breached the power silos yet, that much is certain, so that's something..."

Bobbi tugged on the closest parachute and snapped it into place. "What kind of factory locks people in when it's about to burn down?"

May's jaw clicked, but she never turned around.

"Nuclear." Jemma and Fitz said at the same time, looking equally as grim.

"I'll go." Daisy leapt out of her seat and reached for a parachute the same time as Mack did, almost colliding with him.

"I need you here, Daisy, to run comms!" May shouted from the cockpit, almost nervous.

Daisy pulled a face and her eyes flitted to Fitz for support. "You don't trust me not to rupture the foundation, do you, May?"

"You want to take that chance?" The older woman asked, sounding more like an order. "Maybe you can hack into the mainframe and shut everything down from the plane? The techs on site haven't been unable to do it online, but they're not you."

Daisy sighed her disappointment, then sank down into the copilot's seat and reached for her laptop. "I can try."

"Mack, Bobbi, you're on extraction." May barked.

"There has to be some sort of protocol for situations like these. A manual override?" Simmons voice rose at the end, as it often did when she was under stress.

"They've tried, but nobody there has enough analog experience. Since it's 2015, analog is not something they ever thought they'd need."

"Their software fail-safe's aren't working?" Fitz turned to look at May, who was diligently checking the heat sensor again. 

"It won't shut down because..." May paused for a moment, to gather herself. "She's not letting it."

"I'm familiar with analog." Fitz stood up and grabbed the chute where Daisy dropped it. If he thought too much about what he was about to do, he might lose his nerve.

"Fitz, no!" Simmons shouted, drawing the eyes of everyone in the Quinjet. "You don't have sufficient nuclear training."

"Yeah? Well neither has anyone else, and I'm their best bet." Fitz clipped the chute into place and swallowed back the bile rising in his throat. "Besides, this sounds like a circuitry issue more than anything."

"It's just--" Jemma shook her head, and took a deep breath. "You're okay jumping from a plane?"

"Does it matter?" He scooped up his drone bag and clipped it to the straps of his harness. "We're all gonna die if this thing blows, so I hardly think it matters how I get there as long as I can stop it from happening."

"Then, I'll go too. People might need medical help on site." Jemma grabbed a chute pack from the wall hook and pushed her arms through.

"They're not even out of the building yet, Simmons. Stay with the jet for medical evac." May glowered at the latest reading on the heat sensor. "You guys need to go, now. I think I've found a place to land, but you'll get there faster if you jump in."

Mack unlocked the cargo bay door. "Aye aye captain."

The back door slid open and Fitz grabbed the safety straps above to steady himself from the strong wind that tore through the hull of the plane. He looked back at Simmons, who was white knuckling the sides of her seat.

"I'll take lead," Bobbi said, throwing herself fearlessly out of the plane without a second thought.

"You ready, Turbo?" Mack punched him playfully in the arm before leaping into the atmosphere behind her.

"Not at all." Fitz took a deep breath and followed behind, praying that he wouldn't die before he got the chance to save the day.

 

* * *

 

When Fitz arrived at the power grid, there was already somebody there, one hand resting on his chin in a contemplative stance.

"Lincoln?"

ACTU beat them to the punch this time. Coulson would not be pleased.

Lincoln turned around, only mildly surprised to see Fitz there. "Hey. I'm trying to figure out which areas I need to short out without torching this whole thing like a Roman candle."

"Be careful," Fitz warned, dropping his drone bag to the floor where they stood. "Shutting down one system might trigger another to operate. Shove over and let me take a look."

Lincoln held his hands up and took a step back.

Fitz didn't have a ton of experience with nuclear power, but he did know circuitry, and quickly located the area that would most likely control the locked doors. If they could manage to dismantle it, Bobbi and Mack might at least be able to able to get the workers out before the place blew.

From over his shoulder, he could feel Lincoln watching his every move.

"You have no idea how relieved I am to see you here, man." Lincoln wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his sleeve. "For some reason Price thinks that my ability to control electricity is the same thing as understanding how it works in every application. I learned how to set a broken bone in school, not dismantle a nuclear facility's mainframe."

Fitz examined the pattern of buttons and knobs in the fuse box. "I'm actually kind of surprised to see you here. Figured Rosalind would have vivisected you by now."

Lincoln laughed. "No. I mean, don't get me wrong, she put me through the wringer, probably took more blood at one time than was medically allowed, but they're treating me okay. They're not torturing anybody, even if they are keeping us locked down."

Fitz pulled a heat spectrometer from his bag and hovered it over the panel to get a reading, singing under his breath, "Stockholm Syndrome."

Lincoln shook his head. "More like Uncle Tom syndrome. It sucks to be boxed in, but at least I'm getting to use my medical skills to help other inhumans. Better than being in jail for murder or wearing an inhibitor collar."

"Glad you're not inhibited, but how's your control?" Fitz pointed to a small section of metal knobs, "because I need you to short out this bit over here. Only the first....seven knobs. Don't go beyond that, or - or - bad things will happen."

"Electricity is prob l the one part of my life I still have decent control over." Lincoln closed his eyes and dragged the top of his finger across the knobs in question, sparking each one until it turned black along the way.

The fire alarm that had been blaring nonstop immediately ceased, followed by the loud clicking of the electronic factory door locks.

Bobbi voice came through over the comms. "I'm in."

Fitz gave Lincoln the thumbs up and they shared a look of relief.

"Daisy said you were good," Lincoln said, offering him a smile. "You're should probably know, Price has her eye on you."

"Really? I didn't think I was her type."

"Not like that." Lincoln and Fitz both laughed at the thought. "Anyway, I told her to back off, that you were happy where you were."

Was he happy though? Fitz considered it for a moment. Things may have been warming up between Jemma and him, but Will would be back at some point, and he was fucked if he was going to stick around for that reunion. A change of scenery might just be the thing he needed to keep himself sane, even if Coulson would have his head for it.

Fitz ran the spectrometer over the gears again. "Assuming we live, want to catch a pint after this?"

Lincoln tapped an NA milestone chip hanging around his neck. "Can't."

"Oh." Fitz looked a little sheepish as he stashed his equipment back into his bag. "Well, don't I feel a bit of an asshole?"

"Don't sweat it, you didn't know." Lincoln flashed a magnanimous smile. "I can still drink coffee, though..."

"Yeah?"

"Sure." Lincoln smirked at him. "We'll go some place you can even get yours Irish."

"Excuse you. I think I'll have mine Scottish, thank you very much." Fitz was bolstered by the idea of having a friend outside of work, somebody who didn't know Simmons.

"Cool." Lincoln snapped his fingers together, creating a spark. "Want to see if we can find the temperature gauge, next?"

Fitz hoisted his bag of drones and slung them over his shoulder. "No. I'd - I'd rather see you do that thing with your fingers again, but if we must---"

Lincoln's expression turned stormy as he caught a glimpse of something to the left of Fitz's head in the distance behind him.

Without an explanation, Lincoln forcibly dragged Fitz by the arm behind the nearest corner. "You need to run, Fitz. Now!"

"What - what the hell is out there? What did you see? Was it the girl?" Fitz tried to peep around the corner, but Lincoln roughly yanked him back.

Lincoln put a finger to his own lips and then gestured for Fitz to circle around the small electrical shack so they could cage the interloper in from both sides.

Fitz nodded, withdrew an Icer from his belt, and took off for the other side of the building.

His heart was in his throat. Whatever was out there was so bad that even Lincoln - a guy who could manipulate static energy - wouldn't even risk whispering about it. And the look on the other man's face was serious enough to stop a clock.

As Fitz peeked around the edge of the building, he caught his first glimpse of what had made Lincoln so skittish.

At over seven feet tall with blue spiky hair and a physique that could best a Greek statue, Fitz could barely stop the gasp from leaving his lips.

 _Lash_.

The inhuman's skin glowed almost otherworldly under the heat of the midday sunshine as he rounded on his prey.

"Lincoln Campbell." There was a natural reverb in Lash's voice that Fitz couldn't place, almost like two voices layered over each other into one. The effect was bone-chilling.

"You tracked me all the way out here?" Lincoln emerged from his hiding spot and bravely faced the other inhuman. "You want me so badly, Lash, then come and get me."

Fitz wondered if Lincoln was incredibly stupid, had a death wish or the biggest set of balls he'd ever seen. Maybe all three.

"I'm not here for you, Lincoln Campbell. You have proven yourself worthy."

Fitz realized at the same time Lincoln did what the ramifications of that meant. If Lash wasn't here for Lincoln, that could only mean...

Pulling a splinter bomb from his backpack, Fitz attached it to his drone, Sleepy, and set it free. It's crashed into the back of Lash's neck with a splat, but still managed to adhere nicely to his skin.

Lincoln's eyes widened at the move.

Lash angrily turned to Fitz, raising his hand in his direction, poised to strike. "You're not inhuman."

"No-nope. Well, Simmons says I'm inhuman in the mornings before I've had my tea, but - in the traditional sense - no."

A monstrous smile crested on Lash's face. "I'm going to enjoy killing you."

At that moment, the splinter bomb exploded, knocking Fitz and Lincoln to the ground with the force of the blast.

Once Fitz got his bearings, he looked up, only to find Lash still in one piece, vibrating in place. It seemed as though he was struggling to absorb and metabolize the energy from the bomb. It didn't kill him, but would buy them enough time to get away.

"Oi!" Fitz called to Lincoln, who was still lying on the ground. "You alive?"

"Yep." He pulled himself from the pavement. "We need to run! Now!"

Fitz looked around, noticed the bird landing in a nearby parking lot, and pointed in that direction. "There!"

They both scrambled to their feet and took off toward the airplane as Lash finished cannibalizing the bomb.

By the time they'd reached the bird, Mack was unloading the little girl's unconscious body on board. "She's alive. Bobbi managed to knock her out cold before things got hairy."

May was standing guard near the cargo doors, looking beyond relieved.

Fitz and Lincoln pushed their way into the hull of the airplane and made a beeline for Daisy, whose expression was as haunted as theirs. "I felt him, his particular vibrations. Lash is here, isn't he?"

Fitz looked over at Lincoln, who was white as a sheet and leaning on the wall for support. "He's here, alright. And, much like Steven Segal, he's extremely hard to kill."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lincoln/Fitz BroTp? Are you into it?
> 
> Obviously, I've decided to continue the story, so thank you all so much for the vote of confidence. Since I'm going whole hog, I'm even adding intrigue(!)
> 
> BTW - in case it wasn't clear, Lash was there for the little girl.
> 
> Please let me know what you think. Are you still digging this? Is the plot still easy to follow or have I gotten ahead of myself?
> 
> All of your comments keep me motivated and help me figure out what's working, so if you have the time, please continue. Thanks again for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma is slightly jealous of Fitz's new friendships, Daisy forces Jemma into an impromptu 'mission' and Rosalind drops by for a visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still no beta, so pardon the mistakes.

The sight of blood dripping down the side of Fitz's face turned Jemma's stomach queasy. It wasn't the actual blood that did it, obviously, but the idea that her best friend had once again put his life in danger.

"I can't believe you just jumped out of the plane like that." She shuddered, thoughts drifting without permission to some of her worst memories involving air travel.

She'd thrown herself off a plane to avoid killing her team with the Chitauri virus; had been pushed out of a plane in a medpod, which resulted in her being submerged at the bottom of the ocean floor; and had survived some of May's more harrowing evasive flight maneuvers.

Needless to say, she hadn't had the best experiences with airplanes.

Fitz winced at the first press of the antiseptic swab to his forehead. "Neither can I, but what else was I supposed to do with all of those people down there? You would have done the same."

"I know, it's just...you're injured." Tongue pressed up against her teeth in concentration, she wiped the grit out of his superficial wounds with witch hazel-soaked cotton. "And I know it's only minor, but I can't help thinking how much worse it could have been."

She rubbed hard at one spot to dislodge a piece of rock, ripping a hiss of air from Fitz's lungs. "Ow. This isn't exactly a walk in the park, as is."

"Shh. Hold still and stop being a baby." She gripped his hair in her fist to keep him in place.

"It went pretty smoothly, until that freakish inhuman fellow decided to crash the party." The way Fitz's eyes lit up with excitement as he spoke made her breath catch in her throat. He'd been so hard on himself for so long, it was nice to finally see his confidence return.

"The only pictures I've seen of Lash are from that grainy hospital footage. Is he really as tall as all that?"

"Like an angrier Bruce Banner had sex with Medusa." Fitz tried to pull away from the cotton  but she tugged his hair as a warning to keep still. "Except Lash's skin is sort of a bluish-grey color, like a corpse that's been left in a frozen lake for about a week. I prefer the kelly green skin of The Hulk, personally."

"I've always thought of Hulk as being more of a celadon shade." Jemma tilted her head in thought. "Either way, Lash sounds positively frightening and he could have killed you. I can't believe you set Sleepy on him."

"May he rest in peace." Fitz's disappointment at losing one of his beloved drones was palpable. "Lincoln was great, though, never panicked once. I can see why Daisy likes him."

"So can I," she said, voice a little dreamier than she'd intended.

"Right," he grumbled, "that kind of thing never does seem to escape your attention."

"Like you're any better. I suppose you've conveniently forgotten how ridiculous you acted when Daisy first arrived." She pressed the cotton into his skin again. Hard.

"Hey!" Fitz sucked in a sharp breath at the next swipe.

She pressed a kiss to her latex-covered index finger and lightly touched the worst of his abrasions. "Sorry. I forgot how sensitive you are."

" _You're_ sensitive." He pouted his bottom lip out as he always did when she teased him too much.

"I think I am, actually. I nearly passed out when you jumped from the plane." She continued cleaning, carefully avoiding his eyes. "I kept thinking 'what if he lands in the water, again?'"

His hands covered hers where they trembled against his skin. "I'm okay. Nothing - nothing happened to me."

"What if the chute had failed, or if Lash had blown a hole in your chest before you could hit him with the splinter bomb? What if the factory exploded with you still down there?"

"And what if a meteor hit the playground right now and we all died? It's impossible to plan for things like these."

"You can see a meteor shower coming from--"

"--days away, yes, but you can't do anything about it. Anyway, why torture ourselves with dark thoughts of what might be?" Fitz squeezed her hand once before releasing it.

"I wish I'd never convinced you to do field work with me." Jemma dropped the soiled cotton onto the table, not caring a toss about sanitation in her current state of mind. So much had happened to them since they'd stepped foot out of the academy that she might finally be breaking from the weight of it. "We'd have been safer in the academy lab."

Fitz reached to cup her cheek, but diverted his hand to her shoulder at the last second. "Weaver wasn't safer in the lab during Hydra's strike. She was attacked, hundreds were killed. They even lit the bloody building on fire!"

She shook her head. "Why won't you let me have my fantasies?"

"Because that's all they are. Fantasies. There is no safe. Not in the line of work we've chosen." Fitz tensed as she applied a daub of antibiotic ointment.

"We could go back to the hub." She murmured, under her breath, not sure if she even meant it.

"It's too late to go back now and you know it. Besides, you - you'll be fine. You're smart and brave, and more resourceful than any of the rest of us."

"I'm not worried about me." She smoothed a bandage on his deepest cut, letting her finger trail back and forth over it a few times.

"Wow. Your confidence in my abilities is astounding."

"It's not that, Fitz, it's the unknown dangers that frighten me. How could we possibly be prepared in the future for something like Ward's betrayal or the monolith suddenly coming to life and stealing me away?"

With an exaggerated exhale, he dropped his head back. "There's no human way we can, but whatever it is, we'll be able to--"

"--deal with it together. I know you're right." Jemma grabbed his chin and turned it to the side to examine the scrapes and broken capillaries along the column of his neck. "I'm just tired of the sacrifice, of losing the things that are most important to me."

She ran a thumb over the bruises that dotted his pulse point. They didn't look new. A swell of nausea passed over her as she realized where they must have come from. At least it explained why he was wearing the same shirt two days running.

Fitz placed a comforting hand on hers again. "We'll get him back, Jemma. I promised you I wouldn't stop until we did."

Her expression changed, brow bunching in confusion. "What?"

"Another few days and I'll have completed the amplifier. As soon as we can figure out how to reassemble the monolith rocks, we should have a decent chance at success. If not, we'll just try again until we do."

She hadn't even been thinking about Will, and suddenly felt very guilty about it.

"That's not--" She shook her head and locked eyes with Fitz. "I know you'll get him back. If anybody in the world can do it, it's you."

He cleared his throat and looked away. "Do you still want to run some more experiments on the monolith rocks today?"

"Definitely." She nodded, feeling relieved she didn't always have to be the one to remind him to work on the portal. It couldn't be easy for him, considering her relationship with Will, but Fitz had committed himself to rebuilding the portal as thoroughly as he did everything else he cared about. "I was thinking...you couldn't possibly have retrieved all of the grains of sand and rock after Daisy pulverized the monolith?"

He rolled his eyes at her. "That would be statistically impossible, Simmons. You know that."

"Right. But we're operating on the assumption that any amount of the monolith would be able to transport a person without actually having tested that theory for sure." She lifted one of the jars and held it up to the fluorescent bulbs admiring the way the rocks refracted light.

"I hadn't thought - I'd hoped to jerry-rig the rocks in some way that would be a close enough facsimile of the original structure."

"But we don't know if that will be good enough, Fitz. Not for sure." She set the jar on the table next to them. "The question is, do we need every single molecule? If not, is the amount required dependent on a person's height and weight? Can the monolith be any shape before it's been liquified--?"

"Yeah. I get it." He held his hands aloft. "We have a long way to go, but I am making progress. I've actually fabricated two tuning forks to work in tandem, for layered sound. I'm - I ended up eschewing the um, electrical model in lieu of a more organic amplifier. Similar to, um, one of those things...outside...with the plays..."

"Theaters in the round? Like a Roman amphitheater?"

"Aye. Figured the natural concave shape would provide a more--"

"--authentic replication of the monolith's natural activation process. Yes, of course! Like the that rotunda where Mack said you broke that steam punk-era machine."

He leveled her with a glare. "I didn't break it. It was badly manufactured. And very old. Defective, really."

Jemma smiled indulgently at him. "Of course it was, Leo."

"Anyway, I suppose we should probably order up some rats, for testing purposes."

Her heart clenched at the idea of damning any creature - big or small - to live out the rest of its days on that hellish blue wasteland. But she had no choice. Will was bigger than a rat and he needed their help. They would have to do it, simple as that.

The sound of the lab door swishing open drew their attention.

Lincoln held a hand up in a friendly greeting as he crossed the room. "Coulson said I had to get cleared by Simmons before he'd release me out into the wild again."

"Right." Jemma pulled off her latex gloves and put them in the hazard bin along with the used cotton, then donned a fresh pair. "Let's have a look at you, then."

"I'm a little banged up, though I didn't get it as bad as your boy did. S'what you get for going cowboy."

Fitz shifted in his chair, unused to that brand of praise.

Simmons emptied some witch hazel onto a swab and went to work on the cuts on Lincoln's face. "He might be brave, but he's a terrible patient."

"Oi! I resent that." Fitz pushed off her desk with his feet and rolled over to his side of the lab, then pulled a bag of M&M's from his desk drawer and started to eat.

Lincoln shrunk away from where Simmons was prodding him. "Maybe we can turn that coffee into lunch? I'm starving."

"I'm always hungry." Fitz angled the bag of candy to Lincoln. "Stop-gap?"

"Throw some in the air and I'll catch them."

Fitz tossed a handful of M&Ms in Lincoln's direction. A crackle of static electricity ripped through the room, catching the candy mid-air, and floating the pieces gently across the room into his hand.

"That was tremendous." Simmons would have been more excited by the trick if she hadn't noticed him struggle to put the chocolate into his mouth. "You're favoring your right side. Did something happen to your shoulder?"

Lincoln tried to shrug, but only one side would lift. "It's seen better days, but it doesn't have a giant hole burned into it, so that's something."

"That's because you've proven yourself worthy." Fitz smirked up at his new friend.

Lincoln chuckled at the off-hand comment. "Yeah yeah."

Obviously, this was some kind of inside joke Jemma wasn't a part of - and that neither man felt compelled to explain to her. She wondered how many secret jokes Fitz had with other people while she was gone. That used to be their thing.

Jemma gestured for Lincoln to pull his shirt off, but the man cried out in pain halfway through the process.

"Oh dear." She gathered her stethoscope from her desk drawer and warmed up the drum with her breath before sliding it up the back of Lincoln's shirt. "Your lungs sound okay, so the damage must be skeletomuscular."

"I'm 99% sure it's dislocated."

"Bother." Jemma frowned, she didn't have much orthopedic experience. "I don't..."

"Come on then. I used to do this all the time for my rugby mates." Fitz rolled his chair back over to where Lincoln was standing and took his arm, elbow-to-wrist.

"You sure?" Lincoln's eyes lit up. "Oh man, you have no idea how much I appreciate this. I kind of depend on my gym time for recovery and this could've set me back."

"Sit up very straight and try to relax." Fitz stood up and placed his other hand on Lincoln's shoulder to keep him still, then wrenched the shoulder back into place.

If it was as painful as it sounded, Simmons felt terrible for Lincoln. "You should take a painkiller. I can prescribe--"

"I'm good." Lincoln rotated his shoulder back and forth with a grimace. "I'd rather not, if I don't have to."

"Not even Tylenol?" Fitz asked, looking concerned.

"I mean, I try not to take anything, but if I have to...Tylenol is about the strongest I'll go."

Daisy popped her head through the lab door and waved. "Will he live to fight another day?"

Lincoln smiled back at her, looking more adorably bashful than he had any right to.

Simmons smiled at the exchange. "He'll live."

"In that case...lunch?" Fitz stashed the remaining candy in his desk drawer and brushed off his clothes. "Does this shirt look like I've been fighting evildoers or can I leave it on?"

Reminded again of how close she'd come to losing him, a swell of affection pressed against Jemma's breast. "We've landed at the playground. Any establishment around here will be familiar with that look. I say you're fine."

"And I say," Daisy waggled her eyebrows in Fitz's direction, "that you look really badass with all of those cuts on your face." 

"On that note." Fitz signaled to Lincoln for them to leave.

Lincoln's steps were slower as he passed Daisy at the door. "See you later?"

"Definely." She smiled in a way that seemed uncharacteristically girlish to Jemma.

Jemma idly wondered if this was the way she looked to other people when she was with Will. Not that anybody else was on the planet with them to see.

* * *

 

The moment the men were out of eyesight, Daisy's hand latched onto Jemma's wrist, tugging her toward the door. "AC's office. Now."

"What--?"

" _She's_ here - in there with Coulson - and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit around and _not_ eavesdrop. She's probably doing her praying mantis routine as we speak. Where does Fitz keep the smallest drones?"

 _She_ only meant one person, nowadays, and it wasn't somebody Jemma had any desire to tangle with.

Jemma tried and failed to pull her arm free. "You don't think that's being a little paranoid?"

"She created a nationwide manhunt for Lincoln when he was the one who was attacked, and then turned him into an indentured servant. Anything is possible."

Jemma relented, letting Daisy lead her through the hallways. "Lincoln seemed okay though, so she can't be treating him too poorly. He's certainly made himself fast friends with Fitz. Who would have guessed?"

"Me? I knew they'd get along." Daisy's smile returned at the mention of Lincoln's name. "They're the perfect mix of Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. Plus, they have amazing taste in women."

Choosing to ignore the comment about Fitz's taste in women, Jemma pursed her lips. "Which one is the Hufflepuff and which one is the Gryffindor?"

"They're both both. Obviously." Daisy let out an impatient groan and tugged Jemma into one of the spokes that led to Coulson's office.

Though Jemma had no reason to believe something terrible was afoot, she couldn't help the knots that were beginning to form in her stomach. "It was Rosalind Price, wasn't it?"

Daisy stopped, looking over her shoulder in confusion. 

"I mean, the woman May was referring to as having worked at NASA while Will was there?"

Daisy was too preoccupied with her thoughts to spare Jemma another glance. "I don't know the exact dates offhand, but yeah. Maybe."

"She might have some valuable information on the monolith or the details of Will's expedition to the blue planet." Jemma tried not to get her hopes up, but it was hard. She and Fitz still hadn't been able to locate the blue planet in either the Asgardian or Kree solar systems. Regardless of how nefarious Rosalind Price appeared, Jemma would have to ask. She'd be remiss not to.

"I don't care if she has information on the Zodiac Killer and the JFK assassination, I don't trust a thing that comes out of her mouth and you shouldn't either."

* * *

 

They finally reached Coulson's office, only to be met with the sight of Banks - Rosalind's lapdog - standing guard outside the director's door.

Jemma pulled Daisy into the nearest side corridor and whispered. "What do you think she wants with Coulson? He usually doesn't meet that long alone with one person before bringing team members in for a consult."

"She's been in there an hour." Daisy frowned. "I hope it wasn't a booty call, because yuck."

"You don't think she's trying to get Coulson to turn you over to her again?" Jemma held her breath at the thought. "She has to know he'd never let you go."

Daisy let out a hoarse laugh. "Pretty certain she knows that ship is never coming into harbor. Maybe she's trying to get us to give her Joey?"

"This is all just speculation until we know the nature of their conversation."

"Lurch would know." Daisy glanced over at Banks, whose expression suggested he'd just been sucking on lemons.

Jemma balked. "And I'm sure he's just eager to give away that information?"

"He might feel chatty if he were talking to the right person?" Daisy broke out into a Cheshire Cat grin, which usually meant bad things were about to happen.

"No."

"Come on, Simmons! Just bat your eyelashes at him a bit and lull him into a false sense of security with your dulcet accent."

"No way, Daisy." Jemma shook her head. "Your memory can't be that short that you've forgotten the Titanic-level disaster that was my attempt to flirt with Agent Sitwell? You do it. You're much better at that kind of..." Jemma waved her hand in the air, "stuff."

"Banks hates me. Plus, he has telenovela levels of anger simmering under the surface on a good day. You're much harder to be mean to. It'd be like yelling at Bambi."

Jemma peeked around the corner again at Banks and made a face. Daisy wasn't wrong. He had the worst case of resting bitchface Jemma had ever seen on a man.

Just as she was about to refuse again, Jemma felt a tug on her sleeve.

"Look, you know I don't really have any family to speak of, other than you guys. This is my only home. Having Price here, meeting with Coulson in secret, feels like somebody left a bag of flaming poop on my front porch."

Jemma cursed herself for being such a soft touch.

"That's...disturbingly evocative." She scrunched her face up in disgust before pulling the rubber band from her hair, letting her tresses fall over her shoulders in big waves. "But effective."

It took five minutes of coaching before Jemma made her way down the long hallway to Coulson's office. Even if she couldn't eavesdrop, she could at least try to gather some clues about the nature of the conversation that was taking place.

"Hello...you." Jemma twisted a lock of hair around her index finger. "I haven't seen you around here before. I'm sure I would have noticed."

It hardly earned her a glance. Apparently, Banks was harder to rattle than a Buckingham Palace guard.

"You're working with the ACTU, yes?" She smiled so hard it made her cheeks hurt. "I'm Dr. Jemma Simmons, and I'm extremely interested in speaking to somebody from your science department. Perhaps, whomever is in charge of...chemistry?"

Jemma cringed internally at her awkward failure. Daisy was probably somewhere covering her eyes in second-hand embarrassment.

"We're still in the process of building the department," Banks offered, finally deigning to speak to her. Apparently, even he couldn't withstand experiencing this level of schadenfreude without cracking. "You can try talking to Price about it when she's done with Coulson if you're really interested."

"Oh, I'm very interested." Her words sounded false, even to her own ears. "I'm curious - for scientific purposes, of course - what sort of projects you've been working on?"

Banks finally looked at Jemma - eyes hard and calculating - and the effect was chilling. "Do you know what curiosity did to the cat?"

"Asked it out on a lunch date?" She swallowed hard and forced another smile.

The door abruptly opened and Rosalind - a stark vision in white - strode out into the hallway as though she owned the place. "Don't be a stranger Phil. And you know, feel free to ask us for a _hand_ whenever you need one. Wouldn't want you to have to go _'mano_ _a_ _mano_ ' alone with an inhuman you can't handle."

Coulson leaned against the door frame, smirking. "That's seriously the best you could come up with?"

"That one kind of fell flat, huh?" Rosalind shrugged, her gaze never leaving Coulson's. "Oh well, they can't all be gems. Next time."

With that, she continued down the hallway, Banks close on her heels.

The moment she was out of earshot, Coulson turned toward the nearest corridor. "You can come out now, Daisy."

"You knew I was here?" She emerged from behind the wall.

"You'll remember, I have been doing this spy thing for a while now." Coulson turned to Jemma and sighed. "Et tu, Simmons?"

Unlike Daisy, Jemma at least had the decency to look cowed.

"What did your girlfriend want? Or did she just come by to drop a few hand jokes?" Daisy rounded on Coulson like a crazed mongoose.

"Professionalism at its best." Coulson shot her a disappointed look.

"So, if she didn't come over here just to flirt with you, what did she want?"

"Maybe that's above your pay grade, Daisy?"

"My _pay grade_?" Daisy emphasized the words like they were in a foreign language. "You did not just say that to me."

Coulson stared her down, but Daisy was determined so he ended up breaking first. "She wanted to talk about Lash."

"That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about, too. Mack and I have been thinking that it would be impossible for Lash to have knowledge of newly turned inhumans unless he had an 'in'."

"An 'in' to where?" Coulson crossed his arms, listening intently.

Daisy furrowed her brow. "The ACTU, of course. There are only four people on our side who have access to that kind of information and one of them is now dead. I know it's not you or me, and I'm willing to bet the house that Mack's not involved in something like that. Not with the way he feels about terrigenesis."

"That's pretty much what Rosalind said, though Lash still could have gotten the list through an information breach."

"Not from any software I designed." Daisy placed her hands on her hips in an aggressive stance. "So that still puts the ball in her court."

"She could have them tested for the inhuman gene?" Jemma was wary of wading into such a heated discussion, but somebody had to break the stalemate. "Her employees."

Coulson looked thoughtful. "Pretty sure that violates about twenty different privacy laws."

"Like she cares." Daisy scowled.

"Not if they volunteered." Jemma physically stepped between them and cleared her throat. "If they volunteer, we can rule them out as being Lash. Plus, if any of them presents as being inhuman, we can put them on the index before they can pose a threat to themselves or others."

Her friend side-eyed the last part of her suggestion, as a Jemma knew she would. 

"And if they don't volunteer?" Daisy asked.

"Then we tail them." Coulson said, exchanging a conspiratorial look with his protégée. "I'll call Rosalind and get it set up. Nice work, agents."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this one was kind of plotty, but I didn't want the entire fitzsimmons story to take place in a vacuum, because you don't need ten chapters of them crying at each other.
> 
> So - what did you think of this week's episode? The Lash reveal was so obvious I figured they'd go another way (since they lied last week and told us Andrew died in the preview for this episode), but I'm going to work it in here, too. It's so hard to write a fic when canon is happening concurrently!
> 
> I wasn't thrilled with the fitzsimmons scene - Jemma's not coming across as too sympathetic, is she? Why is she trying to convince Fitz he's going to *love* Will when she knows he's probably still wrecked over getting dumped for the guy? Twist the knife a little more, girl!
> 
> Anyway, please let me know what you think. Are you still enjoying this? Is the plot clear? Are the characters still in character? Do have theories as to where this is going? Brace yourself for the next chapter, because things are gonna get real!
> 
> Any and all comments are welcome and cherished! Thanks for reading.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The monolith is harder to fix than they thought, Lash is out of control, Fitz gets an offer he can't refuse and things get complicated between fitzsimmons.
> 
> Oh, and pigs literally fly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still no beta, so expect mistakes.  
> Also, sending a huge thank you to notapepper for pre reading this chapter and letting me know her impressions before I posted.
> 
> This chapter is a big turning point, so buckle up.

The first amplifier had fallen apart once the vibrations began to hit. The second collapsed under its own weight. The third pitched the sound at the wrong frequency. There were several other tries. All wrong and not worth mentioning.

But the most frustrating obstacle had been the rock itself. 

After a month of daily experiments trying to get the substance to congeal, they'd been left with tiny pools of inky liquid that always hardened as the sound from the tuning fork faded. They weren't creating portals, they were creating puddles.

And that's how Fitz and Jemma ended up dejected, sitting in the middle of the lab, back-to-back in silence as lab rats picked at the crumbs that had fallen off Fitz's morning bagel.

"I'm sorry." Fitz could feel her body shaking against his, even if he couldn't see her tears. "I thought I could do it--"

"You can," Jemma cut in sharply.

He ran a hand over his face, exhausted. "I thought I could."

She said nothing for a moment, but he wasn't stupid enough to think she was done.

"Maybe the substance has a biological component that I've missed?"

"It was the apparatus. Let's not pretend we don't know where the fault lies." He pinched the bridge of his nose to stave off the inevitable migraine.

"We don't know that, Fitz."

"That's just it, Simmons." If he had the energy, he would have turned to face her. "There are just too many variables - both structural and biochemical. It could take a lifetime to go through every different combination until we hit upon on the right one."

"If it were me out there, you wouldn't be giving up." Jemma whispered, almost to herself but loud enough for him to hear.

Hot fury bubbled up from within and coursed through Fitz's veins. He'd tried his best - his earnest best - even when others told him to quit. His heart was broken, but instead of raging against his sorry lot, he funneled all of his energy into making this happen. 

For her. Always for her. Even if it meant only one of them could be happy in the end.

"Well, it isn't you out there, is it?" Fitz finally said. "He's not you. And while I might be willing to work myself into an early grave to find my best friend, I'm not willing to sacrifice my entire career for a man I've never met, no matter how much you love him, Jemma."

"No. Of course not. I don't expect--" A small whimper erupted from her chest, her body grew warm against his back. "I didn't - it's just, he's lost in space, Fitz. He's been there 14 years."

"I know." He inhaled deeply and released it slowly. "I said I would help and I - and I will - but it can't be the central focus of my life anymore."

"I don't know if I can do this without you." She punctuated the sentence with a shaky breath.

"You won't have to. I can still consult. I just can't do -- this." He gestured to the disarray of the room.

"It's strange, our goals and desires being so divergent," she said, more introspective than upset about it. "We always used to want the same things."

"No." Fitz laughed, pathetically. _Was she really so blind?_ "No we really haven't. I just never had the courage to tell you when I didn't."

"Oh." She swiped her hand under her nose. "Deep down I think I probably knew that."

"I am sorry, Jemma. I always want to give you what you want, and it seems I'm always coming up short."

Jemma flipped around, knocking Fitz off balance. Before he could steady himself, her arms were around him, holding him close to her chest. "I'm the one who should be sorry. I've run us both into the ground chasing rainbows and we've accomplished nothing. You haven't come up short. You never do and you never could."

His heart thumped in his chest as it always did when she was this close. He buried his nose in her hair, letting her familiar scent wash over him like a balm.

After pressing a few kisses to the top of his head, Jemma pulled back to look at him, tears brimming in her eyes. "You're the best man I know, Leo Fitz, and if I've ever made you think I've felt otherwise, I've been a terrible friend to you."

"No - no you're - you didn't." Fitz wiped the tears from her cheek with the edge of his sleeve. "I really am sorry, Jem. I know how much...how much you love Will. And I know how p-painful it is to miss somebody you love." That he was talking about her was an unspoken understanding.

He swallowed down the bile that climbed up his throat.

"Fitz." She had a far away look in her eyes. "I can barely remember what he looks like, anymore. Is that weird?"

It was weird to him, because even if he never saw Jemma for the rest of his life, he'd always remember the way her eyes burned amber in the sunlight; how her hands managed to be both were both elegant and practical as she titrated liquids in the lab; and that her nose crinkled adorably every time she laughed.

Those images were burned into his brain, and no amount of time apart could ever erase them from his memory.

"No." He allowed his thumb to sweep across her cheekbone one last time before resting his hands by his sides. "It's to be expected, with all the trauma you suffered."

He hoped she wouldn't pick up on the lie.

Jemma's brow furrowed deeply. "But it's not just how he looks that I can't quite place, it's his voice and the little things we used to talk about."

Fitz's eyes widened, but he looked down to avoid alarming her. There had been so many odd statements here and there that he'd discounted, assuming trauma or grief had clouded her memories.

But then, he'd started researching Will and the picture she'd painted of him only got murkier with time, because much of what she had told him just didn't line up with what he'd read. Most glaringly, the man's age, or lack thereof. "What do you remember about Will, Jemma? Maybe it'll help to talk about him?"

She took a deep breath and let it out, looking terribly embarrassed. "You don't want to hear this."

"I think I have to." And he did. Because something wasn't sitting well with him about Jemma's entire experience on the planet, and he'd just have to out his own feelings aside if it meant keeping her safe.

Fitz had been trying to make sense of it, but every time he thought he'd uncovered one piece of vital information, a thousand other questions would arise. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion and never reaching to the core.

Jemma looked into his eyes to make sure he was telling the truth, then took his hands in hers for comfort. "I remember that he was strong and brave, and he told me all the time that I was too. When he held me I felt safe and cherished. He was handsome, of course, but also a truly good person. And whenever I felt like I was losing my mind, he wouldn't let me. He just kept pushing me to keep fighting."

Will sounded perfect. Part of Fitz actually was actually happy to hear that, because at least he wasn't thrown over for a loser. Unfortunately, it also reminded him of his awkward childhood, being the last kid picked for football in the playground. The kid with no da. The late bloomer. Will's apparent perfection only highlighted his own flaws.

"He sounds amazing, Jemma."

She smiled to herself. "It's funny, because he actually reminded me of...of..."

"Who? Who did he remind you of?"

She looked down at their joined hands and her forehead wrinkled, like she was searching for a long forgotten answer within her own head. "You. He reminded me of you. Isn't that strange?"

Fitz dropped her hands like they were hot coals, because this was too much to bear.

She'd replaced him with somebody who reminded her of him? That was the worst of all options. It meant she loved everything about him but it still wasn't enough to for her to find him attractive. Obviously there was something repellent or broken about him that just pushed her away. He'd already accepted that she would never love him that way - her behavior toward him had proven that - but it hurt to know how close he'd gotten before derailing.

"I think - I think - I think you need to let me look through your phone files now, whether you're ready to revisit them yourself or not."

Jemma's eyes were glassed over, still in a daze, but she managed a short nod.

* * *

 

"I can't talk to her about this. I don't want to freak her out." Fitz was wearing out the carpet, pacing back and forth between the elliptical machine and the rower.

Bobbi, just at the tail end of another set of bench presses, paused mid-air. "You're freaking _me_ out, Fitz."

He leaned against a weight machine, accidentally shoving one of the pins loose, then nearly knocked himself unconscious when he bent to retrieve it.

Bobbi winced at his clumsiness. "Oh God. Please sit down before you push our liability insurance into the next price tier."

"Yes." He perched himself on the edge of a weight bench and dropped his head into his hands. "I think - something always felt off about Will, you know what I mean?"

She laughed, like she was wondering why it took him so long to draw that conclusion. "I know _exactly_ what you mean."

He peeked up from his hands, genuinely surprised. "You do?"

"I may not be a rocket scientist, like some people, but I do have a masters in biology." She hooked the weight bar into its holder and sat up.

"God, Bobbi, I didn't mean to imply--"

With her usual grace, she sloughed off his concerns with a hand wave. "Hit me with the information. Oh, and toss me that towel, please."

Fitz threw her the towel that was folded next to him and tried to organize his thoughts. "She says she can't remember Will, what he looks or sounds like. How do you forget the person you're in love with in the span of barely two months?"

"Could it be trauma?" Bobbi stopped toweling off and draped the cloth around her shoulders.

He gave her flat look. "Did you forget what Hunter looked like after you were tortured in that dirty warehouse and h-had four rounds of major surgery?"

She conceded his point with a shrug. "So what are you thinking?"

"She brought her phone back with her, said she'd been recording messages to me and taking pictures of things, but she hasn't let anybody see? It's so unlike Simmons to hoard data."

"Do you want me to steal it?"

"No. She's finally given me permission to look."

"What do you need me to do?"

"I need - maybe you could talk to her? About Will? Pick her brain for more details, to compare to any information we dig up on him, and we can see her account of him matches up to what we've learned?"

The corners of Bobbi's mouth turned up into a wry grin. "You want me to have girl talk with her?"

He made sure to look as apologetic as possible. "I'm so sorry."

Bobbi groaned at the task, but didn't refuse. "Maybe I should get Hunter to do this? Nosy is kind of his thing."

Fitz reached out and grabbed her wrist in a panic. "No. Hunter's as subtle as a freight train. This requires a light touch."

"I've got you, but what exactly are you looking to find?"

"I think...I don't know yet. Daisy and I have been snooping through the NASA database and - it's only a hypothesis - and I can't exactly go to Jemma with it unless I have definitive proof. Especially since - since she's not been doing any digging herself."

"After two months?" She rested her hand thoughtfully in her chin. "That doesn't sound like Simmons."

"That's kind of my point. She's not even googled him for fuck's sake or contacted his family. What if they have information about his mission that could help us get him back? Wouldn't they want to know he's alive?"

"I see your point." Bobbi placed her hand on his knee and gave it a squeeze. "No promises, but I'll do what I can."

* * *

 

The two ATCU agents who'd tested positive for the inhuman gene were conspicuously missing from their latest joint op mission with SHIELD. Probably tanked like fish, life suspended in bio-goo until Rosalind could find a way to rid them of their fatal flaws.

Fitz just hoped it was voluntary, because the warehouse Daisy showed him footage of reminded him of that horror film 'Coma', which in turn reminded him of his own coma, which depressed him. Plus, the idea of anything submerged in goo made him dry heave.

By some miracle, Lincoln continued to make himself useful enough to the ATCU to avoid joining his kin on a warehouse shelf. Which was great, because Fitz felt a lot safer going out into the field when he had somebody capable of conducting 100,000 volts of electricity by his side. Coulson deemed them a good fit, both controlling electricity in their own ways, and for whatever reason, Rosalind rolled with the decision.

That's how they found themselves in the middle of an Iowa field on a Thursday morning, surveying the area for God-knows-what after a spike of atmospheric pressure alerted the ACTU's goon squad to the possible presence of another inhuman.

"What are we supposed to be looking for?" Fitz place his hands on his hips and stretched his back, leaning into the dull ache leftover from his morning jog with Lincoln.

Hunter had managed to talk him into a drink last night, which turned into five and made his exercise session a waking nightmare for him. But, he didn't want to stand up Lincoln, because then he'd have to tell him why and see the disappointment written on his face. Every morning since their run-in with Lash, they'd been meeting at the gym to train.

Fitz knew he would never be able to fight like a specialist, but he wanted to at least be able to outrun whatever it was that would try to kill him next. The skirmish with Lash had been too close for comfort. When faced with something that ferocious, shaving an extra second or two off his running time could be the difference between life and death.

"Hello?" Growing impatient, Fitz cleared his throat to draw his friend's attention. "Hey! Lincoln! Are we meant to be looking for something in particular or should I just unload every single piece of equipment I own?"

"Hmm?" Lincoln, as usual, only had eyes for Daisy, who was currently sitting on the other side of the field, hands flat against the ground as she tried to sense any deviant vibrations.

Fitz couldn't really begrudge the man. He knew what it felt like to keep your feelings hidden, and he wouldn't wish that brand of torture on anybody.

He nudged Lincoln's sneaker with his foot. "You know, could just kiss her again? I'm, like, 99% sure she'd let you."

Finally feeling the weight of Lincoln's stare, Daisy sat on her heels and mimed shooting the man with her finger, sending a faint trickle of vibration their way. By the size of Lincoln's smile, you'd think he was just shot by Cupid's arrow.

"She said that?" Lincoln finally turned toward Fitz, who rolled his eyes, impatiently. "Don't look at me like that, man. You totally do the same thing!"

"What?"

"Staring at her with those moony eyes..."

"What? I'm not - I'm not into Daisy. I mean, sure, she's very attractive, and there was a time - when she first got here - that I wanted to...and that's not who you're talking about, is it?" Fitz turned a deep shade of red and looked away.

Laughing, Lincoln kicked Fitz's shoe back. "Simmons watches you too, you know - and I know what you're gonna say, but - I still say she's got the hots for you."

"Just stop." Fitz held up his hand to end the conversation. Thinking about her in that capacity - giving himself any hope - just made him feel sick with self-loathing. She didn't love him, not in that way. No amount of wishing would make it so.

One week into recreating the portal, Hunter tried to convince him to give up on the rescue mission. Wanted to know why Fitz would bother bringing home the competition.

But Fitz didn't want Simmons like that. He could never be with her knowing she'd always be wishing he were somebody else. That would be a worse hell than never having her at all. At least he knew he was her first choice in friendship, and that would have to be enough.

Sensing he'd touched a nerve, Lincoln gave him an apologetic look. "Sorry. But, hey, what about the other one - what was her name - Slingblade?"

"Her name is Switchblade," Fitz corrected, just then realizing just how stupid it sounded to say that out loud. "Sam, actually."

"You still seeing her?"

It couldn't have been too long ago - based on the hand-shaped bruise Fitz still had on his thigh - but he honestly couldn't remember the date. "When she's in town, which isn't often. It's not a - not a - um--"

"A thing?" Lincoln raised an amused eyebrow at him.

"Yeah. That."

Just as Lincoln opened his mouth to speak, a large dairy cow flew through the air from out of nowhere and landed at their feet with an agonized moo.

Lincoln turned to Fitz. "What the fu--?"

Before he could get the last word out, Fitz pushed him out of the way of an overweight sow, which crashed right in the place they'd just been standing. "Pigs are literally flying, mate! This has to be a sign of something!"

"How is this my life?" Lincoln whined, from under Fitz's body.

Lincoln and Fitz ran to the nearest place they could find cover, which turned out to be an old barn, dilapidated from years of neglect. The tin roof was so fragile it could barely hold itself up, much less a flying animal. But, it was the only shelter in range, so it would have to do.

As they opened the door, they were faced with the sight of Lash, standing over an overall-clad farmer, as he finished drilling a hole in the man's chest with a blue beam of energy.

They were too late to save him. 

Lincoln grabbed Fitz by the collar and they turned and ran.

* * *

 

After the mission, which had been an unmitigated disaster, Coulson and Rosalind stood next to the bird, locked in a heated argument. Out in the open for anyone to see.

As Fitz and Lincoln approached, Rosalind's eyes sought them out like a beacon, flitting over Lincoln briefly before landing squarely on Fitz.

"Jesus. What the hell did you do to her today?" Lincoln grimaced at the intensity of his boss's glare.

"Nothing." Technically, that was true. He'd done nothing to her _today_ , but in the overarching concept, that was subjective.

He and Daisy knew it was a risk poking around in Rosalind's NASA personnel file, but they were low on options and hoped Rosalind was too busy to notice.

Coulson gestured for Fitz to join their discussion.

"I'll make sure your mother knows you died a hero." Lincoln clapped him on the back before making a beeline straight for Daisy.

"Dr. Fitz." Rosalind crossed her arms over her chest and smiled enigmatically at him. "Just the man I've been looking for. You've been naughty."

Fitz looked helplessly at Coulson, who held his hands up like he didn't want to get involved and backed away slowly.

"H-have I?" He managed to sputter out.

"Don't play coy, it's insulting to both our intelligence, don't you think?"

He swallowed down the dry patch at the back of his throat and nodded.

She grinned at him, like a poker player with a winning hand. "I'm not mad. You'd be a shitty spy if you didn't at least do your homework on me. But what I want to know, is why?"

"You know why." Fitz crossed his arms to mimic hers. "Pretending you don't is just an insult to our intelligence, don't you think?"

She threw her head back and laughed, throaty and deep. "I like you."

"Enough to give me what I've been looking for?"

Rosalind pressed a finger to her lips in deliberation. "Depends what you put on your end of the table."

The sinking feeling in his gut was something Fitz had unfortunately grown very accustomed to over the past year. "Anything."

She smiled again, this time more predatory. "I was really hoping you'd say that."

* * *

 

Even under the green glow of the fluorescent lab lights, with her tired eyes covered with safety goggles and hair haphazardly pulled into a messy bun, Jemma Simmons was still the most beautiful thing Fitz had ever seen.

He took a deep breath and entered the lab, leaning up against the glass wall for support as the doors swished shut. He would have to memorize her like this, drink in as much of her as he could while he still had the chance.

She sensed his presence instantly and turned around, happy to see him. "Did you really get hit by a flying pig?"

"Would I be here, if I had?"

"Ugh, Fitz." She rolled her eyes. "You know what I mean."

"Pig did indeed fly." He crossed to room and threw himself into his chair. "Though I managed to avoid certain death due to my superior evasive footwork."

"I am impressed." She nodded her head encouragingly. "When you hadn't returned with the others, I thought perhaps you'd run off to become an American cowboy. Where were you? I was so dreadfully bored on my own."

"ACTU headquarters."

She made a jealous face and cleared her work station, taking less care with her things than she normally did. "It's been two months and Coulson still won't put me on active duty. Doesn't anyone think that I might like to see a flying pig, too?"

"The guy - the farmer - had some sort of telekinesis. The pig wasn't inhuman, or - er - inporcine?"

"Suidae. That's the genus." She pushed herself up to sit on the edge of the table nearest to Fitz. "And yes, I'm aware the pig didn't have special powers, but it still would've been bloody cool to see. These days, the only time I get to see inhumans is when I catch Daisy stealing my wooolly socks or after somebody's blasted a hole through some unfortunate inhuman's thoracic cavity. If I have to perform one more autopsy through a gaping chest wound..."

Fitz covered his ears and mimed dry heaving. "Can you not?"

Simmons kicked the frame of his chair to get his attention. "Such a wee baby." When he didn't immediately respond with a comeback, her face fell. "What's wrong?"

"How can you tell something's wrong?"

"I know what all of your different faces look like. Don't avoid the question."

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and tried to crystallize this last moment of togetherness in his mind. After today, it would all change. "I've done something, Jemma. Something I don't think you're going to be too happy about. At least, not in - not at first. Eventually, though, I think you'll see it's all for the best."

Her chest began to rise and fall more rapidly and she reached out to grab his hand. "I'm sure it's not as bad as all that."

Fitz shook her hand off, then jumped out of his chair to pace the floor. "It - I --"

"You're scaring me, Fitz."

"I dont mean to, it's just..." He anxiously tugged a bit at the ends of his hair. "I don't know. It's bad."

She stood in front of him, blocking his next circuit. "Whatever it is that you did, I don't care. I would never abandon you. We'll face it together, like we do everything else."

"God, Jemma." Fitz laughed at the cruel irony of the situation. Laughed until his eyes began to frost over with unshed tears. "You say that, but--"

"Look at me." She grabbed him by the chin to force him to face her. The level of concern and determination in her expression left him breathless. There was no doubt in his mind there was love there - fraternal, at least - which only made what he had to tell her harder to say. "We're a team, Fitz. Always."

"Rosalind Price." There. At least he got the first two words out.

Fitz had never seen Jemma look more furious than she did at that moment. "What did she do to you?"

"She didn't do something to me, she did something for me. For you."

Jemma stared into his eyes, looking for a clue, until she found it. "Will. This has to do with Will, right?"

Fitz closed his eyes for a beat to block out her look of hopeful anticipation. "Rosalind gave me access to the redacted docs pertaining to NASA's monolith project, Will's personnel file, their findings. Everything." He dug into his pocket and produced a flash drive, which he forcefully placed in Jemma's hand.

Confusion clouded her face as she examined the small piece of plastic and metal he'd given her. "But this is a good thing, right? It's amazing actually."

"It should give you a good foundation on which to refocus your efforts."

"Give _me_?" She picked up on the discrepancy right away, as he knew she would. "Don't you mean, us?"

He was silent for a moment, then looked at her with the same sad smile he'd worn just before he'd blown the window out of of the med pod, knowing he would be blowing up her life in a different way today. "The information wasn't free, Jemma. I had to - to give her something for it."

"What could you possibly have that she..." It was then, Jemma notice the lanyard hanging out of Fitz's front trouser pocket. She pulled the string and turned the plastic over in her hand.

_Dr. Leopold Fitz  
Chief Science  & Technology Officer, ACTU_

"No. No." She held the card so tightly in her hand she nearly crushed it. "Please tell me you didn't do this?"

"She had a mechanism that could possibly open the monolith, she had coordinates, files and information that could help you. What else was I supposed to do? What would you have done?"

"Not this!" Jemma thew the lanyard to the floor like it had wronged her and grabbed his face with both hands. "No. No, Fitz, you can't. We'll find another way."

"My way could take weeks, months. Who knows how long? You want to get Will home as soon as possible, don't you?"

She shook her head and burst into tears. "Not if it means losing you. Not again."

"You haven't lost me." He cupped the sides of her face as well, and pressed their foreheads together. They stared at each other, an unnamed, complicated emotion brewing between them. "We're always going to be best friends, but we've been headed in different directions for a while now. You know that."

"No." She shook her head, wisps of hair brushing against his forehead. "Please don't leave me. I can't imagine my life without you in it. The thought of it makes me sick." She kissed his cheeks, chin, nose, both eyes, and finally hovered over his lips.

Fitz closed his eyes, felt her warm breath ghost across his lips, until she pressed her mouth against his.

He took a moment to respond, but as soon as he did there was an explosion of energy, sweeping up everything in its path, taking them both with it.

She tasted of salty tears - both his and hers - and her skin felt like velvet beneath his fingertips. It was everything he'd always imagined it would be. It was more.

His hands dug into her hair and held her there, depending the kiss.

Jemma hooked her arms around his neck and pushed herself closer and closer, barely allowing either of them to draw air. "Please, Leo," she whispered against his lips. "Please. Please don't leave me, too."

_Too._

It was those words - and their implication - that brought him to his senses. This was about Will, again.

Fitz gently pushed Jemma to arms length, ducking as she tried to bridge the gap between them again. "This is wrong."

"What?" Her hair was messier than before, lips berry red and swollen from their kiss, which only made it harder for him to do what was right.

"It's not what you w-want," he said, in between panted breaths. "I'm not who you want."

"How can you--" Her mouth dropped open, utterly blindsided, and she shook her head. "You don't know what I want."

"I know. But, neither do you, and I just can't do this. I'm so sorry, Jemma." He pressed one last kiss to her forehead and headed for the door, stopping only once to lift his new lanyard off the floor before leaving the lab for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I was a little nervous about putting the kiss here, in case it didn't seem organic or it didn't come off as hot, but I love angst and this seemed like the right way to scrounge some up. What do you think?
> 
> Jemma's chapter is next, and she'll be exploring the info from the flash drive and (finally) looking into Will herself.
> 
> We're probably past the halfway mark - I'm aiming for eight chapters (which means there will probably be closer to 10) - so if you're still digging this, please let me know and I'll try to hunker down and finish soon.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Looking forward to hearing all of your comments!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The women get drunk, an awkward video call occurs, weapons are built, portals are calculated and one of the team members gets badly injured.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to notapepper for looking over this beast before I posted.
> 
> Hope you like it!
> 
> PS - more questionable science abounds, so if you happen to be an astrophysicist, you might want to look away.

Lately, Jemma had been feeling untethered. Unwilling to consider the obvious, she'd been convinced the problem had to metabolic. The force of gravity that anchored her to the ground had been different so long that it would be difficult for anyone to reacclimate to the Earth's pull.

That's what she told herself, at least.

Better a problem she could solve through science than one that had no definitive answer.

Her own room didn't smell of her and this new bus didn't hold the same memories as the old one.

The new lounge might've looked similar to the old one, but it wasn't where she and Trip had played poker on lazy afternoons. The kitchen wasn't the same kitchen she and Skye used to sneak into to eat frozen cookie dough straight out of the tube at midnight. Skye wasn't even Skye anymore.

But, feeling out of place in her own lab was definitely the worst. What had once been her oasis, now felt as empty and lifeless as the Salton Sea.

Sitting in Fitz's room though, she felt nostalgic and safe. Most of his belongings were gone, but the human body sheds almost a million cells a day, so there had to be something of him still there. It comforted her to know some microscopic part of him still remained, even if she had driven off the rest of him in the worst of all possible ways.

"Are you moping in here again?" As usual, Daisy didn't wait for Jemma to answer before letting herself in.

"Just needed a place to be alone." Jemma smiled and lifted her teacup to her lips.

"You couldn't be alone in your own room?" Daisy shut the door behind herself and crawled onto Fitz's bed beside her friend. "It's weird not having him here, huh?"

Jemma nodded and took another sip of tea. If she focused on the tea, maybe she could manage to have this conversation without actually being present for it. Daisy had been hounding her all week to talk - like a dog with a bone - and Jemma knew she couldn't put her off much longer.

Daisy pulled a bottle of whisky from her robe pocket and poured some into Jemma's tea without asking.

"You know, it's funny. Besides my short stay at Afterlife and those nine days Fitz was...you know," she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, "I've haven't spent a day apart from him since I got here. He's like a brother to me and I miss him like crazy. I can't even imagine what it must be like for you, having been with him for over ten years."

Jemma turned her attention back to the tea to keep herself sane. "Well, I don't think of him as a brother."

Daisy laughed, loud and unashamed, as she always did. "I should hope to hell not. That would be a little too 'Flowers in the Attic' for my taste."

"I don't know what you'r--"

"Come on. Pretending something isn't blue does _not_ make it red." Daisy took a swig out of the bottle and rested it on the bed between them. "You're telling me you've never thought about it?"

Jemma took as long as possible with her next sip of tea to buy herself some time. "Have you?"

"Uh, yeah? I'm a woman with needs." Off Jemma's shocked look, Daisy nudged her with her foot. "What? This is a very small plane and we've got a limited pool of men at our disposal, I'd be dead if I said I hadn't thought about it."

Something dark and twisted began to fester inside of Jemma like an open wound. "Did you ever, um, do--"

"Oh God, no. I mean, okay once, I almost did. It was right after my terrigenesis when I was still being isolated in the med bay. I was so scared and he was honestly the only thing keeping me from having a full-blown nervous breakdown. I probably would've caused a medium-sized earthquake if he hadn't talked me down."

A pang of guilt hit Jemma in the gut, remember how uncomfortable she'd been with Daisy's growing powers at the time. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you like I should have been. I was just still having a difficult time dealing with..."

 _Trip_. Neither of them had the energy to talk about Trip tonight, so they let it go unsaid.

"It's okay. I get it. Anyway, Fitz had me covered. I was such a mess and he just held me for an hour and told me that I wasn't bad, I was just different now and there was nothing wrong with that."

Jemma was rendered speechless by the story, by Fitz's seemingly endless compassion. There were so many things she didn't know about her best friend and it seemed the list grew longer every day. "That's..."

"Fitz. He swore we'd work it out together, and we did. He's ride or die like nobody I've ever known."

"And so you kissed him, then?" Jemma tried to push away the sick feeling of jealousy that had taken hold of her.

"I thought about it. I mean, he's kind of filled out and grown into himself over the last couple of years, hasn't he?" Daisy smirked, clearly reveling in Jemma's sudden unease. "And have you ever checked out his ass? Perky."

Jemma slammed her cup down a little too hard on the bedside table. "I haven't."

"Right. You're wearing his cardigan, sleeping in his bed and trudging around the bus like you're heading up his funeral procession, but you've never checked out his ass. I call bullshit."

Jemma sighed, then pulled the bottle of whisky from Daisy's hands and had a drink. "Okay, fine. I'll admit, his bum is...symmetrical. And perky. Are you happy?"

She shook her head. "No. I'm not happy. And neither are you, but probably not for the reasons you think."

Jemma tipped the bottle into her mouth and kept drinking until she heard Daisy gasp.

"Dude!" Daisy grabbed the bottle from her hand. "Leave some for the fishes."

"I'm English," Jemma said, using a ridiculously arch accent, as thought that alone was explantation enough for the binge.

"Look, I haven't said anything until now, because I know how repressed you British people are about feelings and emotions and crap like that. But, Dr. Garner is gone, and I know you haven't called another psychologist from the base to speak to." She leveled her with a look.

"I'm fine." Jemma reached for her tea again, feeling the need to keep drinking. "Right as rain."

"I'm no shrink, but I know that's not true." Daisy grabbed Jemma's free hand and placed it on her lap. "You don't have to talk to me about it, but you've got to talk to somebody, because you've been through the wringer and no matter how much you and _Leopold_ tell me something bizarro didn't happen between the two of you before he left, I'm not buying it. He's acting just as sketchy as you are."

"Fine, you've got me." Jemma threw her hands in the air in mock surrender. "You clever girl."

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself and just talk to me!" Daisy said, practically growling at her.

Jemma had no idea where to start, so she just said the first thing that came to mind. "I miss Will. It's like I've got this dull, chronic pain around my heart that never leaves."

"Understandable." Daisy squeezed her knee, encouraging her to continue.

"But I miss Fitz too, and the pain from that is...is...so acute. And when I think about him being gone from my life forever, it's like I can't breathe." She took another sip of her spiked tea and rested the mug on her thigh.

Daisy regarded her silently for a moment, making Jemma feel as open and exposed as one of her dissected lab animals. "Do you feel guilty about missing Fitz more than Will?"

Jemma's face collapsed and she started to cry. She cried so easily nowadays, it barely registered with her anymore. "Intellectually, I know that Fitz and I have been best friends for a decade, whilst Will was only part of my life for a short - very intense - time. Missing Will still feels like missing another, very important person, but missing Fitz is like--"

"Missing part of yourself?" Daisy gave her a half smile. "I get it. You guys practically share a brain."

"Something did happen before he left," Jemma said, barely audible. "I did something."

Daisy nodded. "I know Jemma. You two are not subtle."

"I keep turning and expecting to see him in the lab. Knowing that he's never going to be standing there again and that I might have lost him for good..." She took a moment to gain control. "I've messed things up so badly, Daisy. I don't even know who I am anymore."

"Hey." Daisy pushed up onto her knees and pulled Jemma into a hug. "I know who you are. You're the beautiful, brilliant and unsinkable Jemma Simmons! A woman who - with nothing but the clothes on her back - survived for six months on another fucking planet. Like a boss! My ass would've been dead in three days. Tops. You've managed to accomplish the impossible, so don't ever forget how special you are."

She smiled into her friend's shoulder, feeling lighter now for having been able to unburden herself. "What am I gonna do?"

"You're in love with him, aren't you?"

Jemma picked her head up. "Will? Yes."

Daisy gave her a flat look. "Not talking about Will."

Jemma nodded her head and began to cry again. "Maybe I've always been and didn't realize it? I just feel so...broken."

"You're not broken, you're just different now. And there's nothing wrong with that." Daisy handed Jemma the bottle of whisky. "And we're going to figure this thing out together. I promise."

The sound of somebody knocking pulled them both from the moment. Jemma wiped the evidence of their conversation from her face and angled her head toward the door.

"Enter at yer own risk!" Daisy shouted, in a poorly-done pirate's voice.

Bobbi, wearing a pair of Hunter's boxer shorts with a tank top and fuzzy yellow slippers, let herself in.

"I heard talking and I thought..." She looked at the half empty bottle of whisky in Jemma's hands and laughed, before lifting the bottle of Scotch she'd had hidden behind her back. "Glad we're all on the same page."

Daisy shifted to make a space for Bobbi on the bed. "Just having a little girl talk."

"I could be down with that." She said, setting herself up next to Jemma on the other side. "I was thinking actually, you haven't really told me much about Will."

Apparently, her entire life was now fodder to be picked through. "What do you want to know?"

Bobbi smiled and uncorked her scotch. "Everything."

* * *

  
It had been the hardest video call of Jemma's entire life. Her finger felt like lead as she'd run it down the cold glass screen of the tablet and pressed the first entry on her list of favorites.

But it had to be done. She couldn't let things get weirder between them than they already were. She knew from past experiences that the longer they left things unsaid, the more they ended up having to say.

Jemma thought there was little chance Fitz would avoid her, but she certainly didn't expect the look of unadulterated relief he wore when he answered the call.

"Did you get the files Daisy was able to get off my phone?" She asked, watching with fascination as he toiled away on a project much bigger than the ones they'd usually done for S.H.I.E.L.D.

He paused his work for a moment, then went right back to it without sparing her a glance. "I - I did, but I haven't had the chance to look at them, yet."

"Oh." She knew it was silly, but she felt oddly disappointed he hadn't made it a priority. "Busy day?"

"You might say that." He gestured to the large piece of machinery he was working on.

It was shiny and enormous, with several ominous looking gauges.

"Is that..." she took her safety goggles off and looked closer at the screen. "What is that?"

He swept a hand across the top of the device, like a game show host. "A modified portable harmonic oscillator."

She couldn't help but smile at how pleased he was with himself. "Is Rosalind secretly a Saudi sheik? How did you afford something like that?"

"I built it." He brought his hands to his hips and looked down on his creation with pride. "I - ahem - 'borrowed' the splinter bomb tech and adapted it to this."

"Oh my God, Fitz. It's beautifully made. But what are you using it for?"

"To create a localized, ah, black hole. A zero energy point. A simulation of the C--"

"Casmir Effect? Is that safe?"

It wasn't. In fact, it was catastrophically dangerous. She was well-enough versed in physics to be certain of that.

By the guilty expression on his face, he knew he'd been caught out. "That's kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I'm trying to figure out a way to make energy inert without destroying the structure of the atoms."

Fitz wasn't the type to just let something go. He'd keep working on it until he killed the problem or the problem killed him. She had no choice but to help, despite her objections. "Depends on how you plan to localize it. When you halt the exchange and conversion of energy, it could have a knock on effect."

"I figured. But - but there's a way around it?" He disappeared behind the machine for a moment, before returning with a pressure gauge in his hand.

"You could, theoretically, safely neutralize a target that has an energy output greater than sum zero, but you would have to--

"--calibrate it correctly. Right--"

"--or you could wipe out the entire area."

His face dropped. "And by wipe out, you mean...?"

"All matter compressed. All life - gone."

He took a deep breath and gingerly placed his hand atop the oscillator. "And by area...?"

"Indeterminable."

Fitz scrubbed a hand roughly over his face while mumbling curse words in a brogue so thick Jemma assumed they couldn't have been English. "Well, that's shite."

"Fitz, this isn't something to be played around with lightly. What on Earth could you possibly need an antimatter device for?"

"How else do you stop a - an inhuman killing machine who can organically convert all energy - kinetic, static and otherwise - into a weapon?"

The realization of whom he was talking about made her weak in the knees. "Lash."

"We don't know if his powers are reactive as well as active. Unless you happen to know the number for Dr. Charles Xavier or somebody else who can safely freeze a person in place without touching them, I don't know how else we can depower Lash long enough to, um, you know..."

"Subdue him?"

"Yeah."

"Well, have you ever thought of just...freezing him? The old fashioned way? Because under extremely low temperatures, it's possible to--"

"--retard all cell activity!" He fist pumped the air like he always did when they had a breakthrough. "Simmons, I could kiss you right now!"

The silence that followed was so oppressive it threatened to cause the Casmir Effect on its own.

Fitz winced at his faux pas, but diffused the situation immediately with a joke. "And here I was worried this might be awkward."

"It's not." Her stomach relaxed at the sight of him laughing. "In fact, this is the possibly least awkward we've been together in a while. Science is what we do best."

"No. Science is amazing, but friendship is what we do best, Simmons." He sat down on the edge of the table and lifted one of his stray pens, twirling it absently through his fingers. "At least, it used to be."

"It still is." His nimble fingers continued to twirl the pen, almost mesmerizingly.

"Yeah. I hope - really hope that's true." His warm eyes flicked to the camera and it was almost like having him next to her again.

Jemma stared at the screen so hard that she thought it might shatter. "I really miss you, Fitz."

He ground the heel of his hand into one of his tired eyes and smiled - looking more boyish than a man of his fraught history should. "I know."

When she pulled herself out of her reverie, the lab felt colder than ever. "I hate coming to work and not seeing you across from me. It feels wrong."

He touched the screen with his index finger, letting it linger for a few seconds. "Well, we're across from each other, now. That's good, right?"

She scooted a few inches closer - cleared her throat - and tried to get up the nerve to ask him the question she'd been agonizing about all week. "Please tell me I haven't mucked everything up between us?"

He let out a huff of air and shot her an admonishing look. "No. You never could."

"If only that were true." Her brain hurt. She yanked the rubber band out of her hair and shook the strands loose.

His eyes followed her movements like a Victorian painting. "Jemma."

"I feel like everything I do nowadays is just wrong. Do you know what I mean?"

"Of course. That's how I felt after... _after_." There was only one 'after' where Fitz was concerned.

"It's easier talking to you like this. So far away, but yet, somehow you feel even closer. Like you're a beautiful mirage or a hologram and I can say everything I've always wanted to tell you without worrying how you'll react."

"You can always tell me anything, wherever we are. I would never judge." He pressed his lips together in frustration, but his eyes were so soft and inviting she wanted to warm up under their gaze forever. "You've got to know that by now, Jemma."

She took a breath and nodded once. "You know, I used to talk to you. When I was...away. I'd imagine the advice you'd give me, describe what I was seeing to you, and just generally ramble on and on about anything and everything, really. Anything to keep me sane. And I'd look at your picture a lot, especially right before bed when I was feeling lonely or scared. I must've watched that video you made for my birthday a thousand times..."

Fitz breathed in sharply and let out a shuddered exhale. "You did?"

"I memorized it. Tried to imagine what happened right afterward. Did they let you eat the door of the tardis, I wondered, or did May make you share with everybody? I'd resigned myself to never knowing the answer."

"I ate nearly the entire tardis." He said, very earnestly, and they shared a laugh. "Daisy was so mad she had to eat sidewalk. Mack said as long as what he ate it had frosting on it, he didn't care."

She pursed her lips. "Greedy, Fitz. I'll bet you made yourself sick."

He cleared his throat and looked away. She could see the profile of his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed hard. "I watched videos of you, too. Talked to you. It was--"

"Unsatisfactory."

"Yeah. I just needed to see you so badly sometimes I thought it might make me crazy. But even when you were gone, you're were always in here." He tapped the side of his head.

She was overwhelmed by sentiment, and perturbed he wasn't close enough to wrap in a hug. "I know exactly how you feel."

His smile broke into something strange and sad. With a nod, he began to aimlessly straighten the papers on his desk, barely taking any care at what he was doing. "Speaking of that, have you had made any progress on the portal?"

She frowned, not sure what cause the shift in conversation, but had wanted to discuss it with him anyway. "You remember I told you when I was on the planet, I noticed that the coordinates for the portal stayed the same, but the planet rotated, which made it appear as though the wormhole was moving locations?"

"I remember."

She lifted some printouts she'd made from the files Rosalind gave them and thumbed through the pile. "I've been reading through some historical eyewitness accounts over the years - some far too old to even verify - that sound suspiciously similar to what we'd be looking for."

"You're saying, there might be a corresponding point on Earth that opens on its own?"

"Yes. A permanent portal that opens up at designated times for a short period, and then seemingly changes location, based on the axis of the Earth."

He pressed his fingers to his lips in thought. "It would have to be somewhere remote to have been hidden for so long, like perhaps somewhere in Asia, like Central--"

"--Mongolia. That's what I thought."

He pulled something up on a screen she couldn't see and narrowed his eyes. "And not just one location, but all of the points of entry along the latitudinal access. They would all have to be desolate to stay hidden, so that should help us narrow down the, um..."

"Coordinates." Jemma leaned forward and turned on the portable holotable. "Shall I load up the topographical world atlas? We can check for unusual magnetic disruptions in that area or perhaps first turn an eye towards the pattern of movement of the tectonic plates?"

"Activate the screen-sharing and we'll see what we can find when we put our heads together."

"But Fitz, don't you have," she gestured at the project he had in front of him. "What about your Casmir Effect?"

He made a sour face at the machine he'd put so much time and effort into. "That's done for. Your idea was better, safer, and we've already got the technology for something like that. I'd just need to miniaturize it, and that, you know I can do in my sleep."

"Donnie's machine?"

"Excuse you, I'm the one who completed the algorithm for that. He would have barely been able to produce an ice cube without my input."

She rolled her eyes at him. "It feels wrong to congratulate you on that, seeing as the outcome was less than ideal."

"It's not my fault Donnie was a psychopath who got his best friend killed through a combination of h-hubris and sheer stupidity. He nearly blew a hole in the ozone in the process. I would never be that reckless with your safety."

"I know that." She smiled and placed her fingertips on the edge of the screen, almost convincing herself she could touch him if she concentrated hard enough. "And if you had nailed me with a cold beam, you'd at the very least have loaned me one of your cardigans to warm me up."

"Knowing you, you'd have already stolen one." His blue eyes twinkled with mirth at her sputtered reaction.

"Are they treating you okay over there? I don't even know where you're staying."

"I'm crashing on Lincoln's couch until I find a place, but he said he'd be willing to move with me if we can find a large two bedroom."

"Daisy will be jealous."

"Doubtful. She's certainly over enough as it is."

Daisy hadn't mentioned anything to Jemma about seeing Fitz. She wondered if it was done to spare her feelings or Fitz's. "Oh. I hadn't known."

Fitz went back to busying himself with nothing. "You could...too. C-come over?"

She smiled, knowing it was reckless to even let herself consider it. "Just name the day."

The sounds of people arguing of the lab were loud enough to permeate the glass doors.

Fitz's brow furrowed. "What's happening over there? Is somebody hurt?"

"Good question." Jemma rushed across the room to investigate, and was immediately knocked into by a frantic Daisy, followed closely by a shirtless Mack, who was pushing a gurney with a body on it.

"Who is that?" Fitz called out helplessly.

Jemma grabbed her med kit and leaned over Joey's barely-conscious form. "What am I looking at?"

Daisy's hand firmly held Mack's blood-soaked shirt to Joey's shoulder and neck. "We went to investigate a possible terrigenesis at the docks down by the Potomic, and Joey got hit."

"Hit by what?" Jemma reached out to remove the shirt, but Daisy held her off.

"I think his artery was nicked. There was just so much blood."

There were scorch marks along the edge of Joey's collar bone, but they were superficial. He'd gotten lucky.

Jemma nodded and pulled a rubber tourniquet from her bag. "Daisy, get a type O blood bag and an IV line for me from the fridge. Mack, I need you to come over here and apply pressure to the wound while I tie it off."

Daisy ran off without a word, while Mack - looking more shaken and pale than she'd ever seen him - stood frozen above Joey's body.

"Mack, now!" Jemma barked, spurring her teammate into action.

Once Jemma stemmed the bleeding and was able to stabilize Joey's pressure, she turned to Mack for more information. "How?"

"The inhuman we were tracking had developed the ability to control atmospheric humidity."

Daisy attached the bag of blood onto the drip hook and wheeled it over.

"She could make it rain?" Jemma pressed a needle into Joey's healthy arm and started the transfusion.

Mack nodded. "Fog, too. She didn't have the best control, but she was harmless."

"What happened?" She checked Joey's pupils, which were both normal and reactive, and exhaled her relief. "How was he injured?"

"Lash." Mack's expression hardened at the memory. "He'd been looking for Joey. Seemed to be pleased to kill two birds with one stone. And he did. She didn't make it." He looked down, dejected.

Jemma reached out and grabbed Mack's hand. "Well, Joey's safe now. Just a minor surgery to repair the artery and he'll make a full recovery."

"It was his first mission and I'm his S.O." He rubbed a hand over the top of his head and then rested it on Joey's thigh. "Maybe Garner was right about him not being ready? Maybe I messed up by pushing it?"

"Hey," Daisy circled the gurney to the other side, where Mack was standing. "We made that call together. It's not on you."

"Maybe." Mack nodded, but didn't look convinced. "But, I'm going to kill that avatar-looking motherfucker if it's the last thing I do."

Jemma glanced over at her tablet screen and locked eyes with Fitz, who smiled tightly and bobbed his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew. I am burning the midnight oil trying to get this to you all before canon catches up and kicks this story in the ass.
> 
> So - good/bad? Notice the hints of Joey/Mack? I would love to hear what you all are thinking, what you liked, what didn't work, all of your theories. Or you could just drop by and say hi.
> 
> Thanks so much to all of you for reading and especially to those of you who've left feedback - you're awesome :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobbi and the boys have a secret meeting, Daisy and Jemma go for movie night at Lincoln/Fitz's apartment, Jemma has a theory about the portal, and Fitz finally listens to those phone recordings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That episode!!! It was like AoS wrote the fanfiction for us this time, right? Ugh. How to compete? Hopefully you'll also like my twist on the events.
> 
> Thanks so much to Notapepper for giving this the once over. I write on my iPad, so she's saved you from a ton of bizarre autocorrects.

Bobbi's mane of blonde hair was about the only thing visible through the dirty windows of the Greek diner where they had agreed to meet. She'd no doubt be annoyed by Fitz's tardiness, but Theta Protocol was all the way across town, and they wanted to meet as far away from ATCU headquarters as possible.

"Sorry we're late." Fitz slid into the booth across from Bobbi with Lincoln following close behind. "How's Mack holding up?"

Bobbi let out a puff of air. "He's been better. Hasn't slept in his own bed in two days."

"I thought he wasn't injured?" A knot began to form in the center of Fitz's gut. He didn't have enough bandwidth to handle anybody else he loved being in danger right now.

"No. He's just been keeping vigil at Joey's bedside like an Italian widow."

Fitz raised his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"Yeah. I mean, I don't think anything's happened yet, but near death experiences do have a way of clarifying your feelings about somebody." Fitz and Bobbi exchanged a knowing look. "Either way, his trigger finger is getting itchy for this Lash guy."

"Did he get the 'Chill-out Gun' specs I sent over?"

"Yeah." She rifled a laugh. "You're not really going to call it that?"

"I most certainly am. The name is perfect." Fitz sat forward in his chair, hackles raised. Other people might make fun of his project names, but they are his projects and the names are awesome, so they could suck it.

Bobbi begged Lincoln with her eyes to back her up.

Lincoln smirked. "It could be worse, Bobbi. You should have heard the names he wanted to use before Price vetoed them."

"Frankie Say Chillax makes a very cool action hero punchline." Fitz crossed his arms over his chest. "Coulson would appreciate it."

"Ugh. Probably." Bobbi threw her hair over her shoulder. "Not sure that's a selling point."

Fitz could feel Lincoln's sideway glance burning a hole through his neck. "Bobbi, uh, Lincoln's come up with a theory about Lash."

She looked at him expectantly. "Ok?"

"It's kind of - well - it's not easy to say, but I can't think of anything else that makes sense." Lincoln shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "We know Lash has a list of the inhumans from Afterlife, since so many of my friends have turned up missing or dead. The only people who have access to that list work at S.H.I.E.L.D. We can safely rule out Daisy and Mack, since they were both with me when we were attacked by Lash at the hospital."

Bobbi's expression clouded. "Nobody else had access to that list besides Dr. Garner, and he's dead."

"Is he though?" Lincoln wrinkled his nose, looking rather sheepish. "They never found a body, right?"

"The entire store and everything inside of it was incinerated," she said, hints of doubt creeping into her voice. "But...something strange did happen when we found Strucker junior. Before he passed out, he told May that Garner changed into a monster right before the fire. We assumed it was just the blood loss talking, but the kid looked genuinely scared."

"Do you think--could he have been turned inhuman?" Fitz blanched at the thought. It had been hard enough watching May try to grieve in her solitary way, unwilling to let anybody help her, but to add something like this on top of her pain seemed unimaginable. "Daisy said Lash could change form, from monster to man. Maybe Dr. Garner can change back and forth and - and isn't even aware of what he's doing when he's Lash? If he's Lash."

"That's..." Lincoln's nose scrunched up again, which wasn't a good sign. "Inhumans don't change form. If he's going back and forth, that means he just hasn't completed his terrigenesis yet."

"You're saying he could be stuck as Lash?" Fitz asked.

Lincoln bit his lip. "I'm saying the man you know - if he's still alive - is disappearing."

"Fuck." Bobbi blew out a stream of air. "I'll relay all of that to May. Until then, you need to be careful, Lincoln. You're probably back at the top of his hit list."

Lincoln nodded, but looked strangely more burdened now than he had before he'd gotten all of that off his chest. "Fitz, you want to talk about what we really came here to talk about?"

He really didn't. Talking about a serial killer was easier, more removed.

Even the odd passive mention of Will made Fitz want to shove his head own into a glass door, but he didn't have a choice. "Yeah, alright, let's jump down that putrid rabbit hole."

"Okay," Bobbi said, pulling up a list she'd made on her phone. "According to Jemma, Will is in his early 30's, yet she also claims he had been stranded on the planet for 14 years. Oh, and according to Lance, he also has a hog-face."

"I hope he does have a hog face." Fitz mumbled under his breath, a genuine smile making a rare appearance. Hunter was a great friend. "Simmons and I may have been child prodigies, but it's not exactly common. We're exceptional. Unless Hogface is like, uh, the Doogie Howser of astronauts, that's totally impossible. They don't send people into space at 18."

Fitz prayed Hogface wasn't some kind of savant. If he was, then Fitz definitely had no chance with Jemma.

"Unless he lied about his age," Bobbi said, shrugging. "Or lied about the amount of time he was stranded on the planet.

"The newspaper articles I've found verify his age as 32 at the time of the mission. And, Jemma said the equipment she used to calculate the portal location was extremely outdated, by at least a decade." No matter how much he'd seen, Fitz would never get used to this supernatural shit. "I think that only leaves a few explanations, and none of them are of this Earth."

"Maybe the guy doesn't age?" Lincoln looked back and forth between Bobbi and Fitz's skeptical expressions. "What? Jaiying didn't age, so we know it's possible."

Fitz had a moment of clarity. "Are you suggesting Will is an inhuman?"

"Jaiying did say the monolith was deadly to inhumans." Lincoln rested his chin in his hand. "Maybe it reacted to him?"

Fitz had a sudden moment of panic. "Are you suggesting Simmons is an inhuman?"

"You have something against inhumans?" Lincoln shot him an unimpressed look.

"No! It's just, if she is, she hasn't undergone terrigenesis." Fitz looked down at his coffee. "And I'm not c-certain she'll ever want to."

"Hey." Bobbi rapped her fingers on the table to get their attention. "Let's cross that bridge if we get to it. Today, we're here to talk about Major Tom."

"Right." Fitz sat back in his chair, and forced himself to put the idea of Jemma's possible inhumanity on hold. "Anything else strike you as odd?"

Bobbi ripped open a granola bar package with her teeth. "He told her he wasn't 'sciency', which I thought made him sound like either the most humble member of NASA or the most incompetent. Either way, she did all of the portal calculations herself."

"That's not enough." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "She might just have misunderstood him or perhaps he was being modest."

"Well, she also told me he captured her and put her in a cage when he first found her." Bobbi looked at Fitz with the kind of sympathy one reserved for somebody who'd just been kicked in the nuts. "So, I guess you could say they had a 'meet cute'."

"What?" Fitz's vision started to white out.

Will kept his Jemma in a cage like an animal? And she still fell in love with him?

Fitz wondered if he really knew her at all anymore.

"That sounds like the beginning of the movie 'Saw', not the beginning of a great love affair." Lincoln grabbed Fitz's shoulder and gave it a little shake. "Hey buddy. You still with us?"

Fitz speculated this was what having a stroke felt like. "What."

"Do you think I should get my med bag from the car?" Lincoln wondered aloud. "He doesn't look so hot."

"Yeah...I was on the fence about telling him that one, but he did say he wanted to know everything." Bobbi shrugged and took a bite of her granola bar. "Whatever you all need me to do to help get this creep away from her, I'm in. I don't care how cute he is or what kind of tricks he uses in bed--"

"Bobbi!" Lincoln lightly kicked her under the table.

"--just saying that a guy capable of keeping a girl prisoner in a cage is an immediate red flag as far as boyfriend material goes."

Fitz groaned, folded his arms on the table and then dropped his forehead on top. "Please stop talking."

Bobbi leaned across the table and ruffled Fitz's hair. "Would it make you feel better if I crossed him off for you?"

"Yes!" Fitz shouted, without thinking, then raised his chin and expelled a long sigh. "No. I mean, I would very very much like for you to cross him off, slowly, in the most unpleasant way imaginable, but Simmons...we can't make that decision for her."

Lincoln scoffed. "She's obviously not in her right mind, man."

Jemma wasn't acting like her old self, but she wasn't crazy. That much he knew. "It's still not our call. All we can do is present her with the evidence and hope she makes the best choice for herself."

By her expression, Bobbi could see right through him. "Alright. What about the phone files, then? Learn anything new?"

Fitz's hands started to shake and he twined them in his own hair to keep them occupied. "I can't. I haven't."

"Aw, Fitz." Bobbi tugged his hands away from his head and smoothed them down onto the table. "I know you're dealing with a lot - both of you are - but you need to do this."

"I know."

"I hate to see you both looking so sad."

"Simmons is sad?" He knew the answer already, he could practically feel her sorrow tug at the other end of his heart strings, but to was still nice to be told.

"God, you nitwits really know how to get in your own way, don't you?" Bobbi leaned forward and straightened Fitz's collar. "She's moved into your old room. What do you think?"

He tried not to read too much into it. "She did always prefer the direction my dresser faced to hers."

Bobbi groaned and grabbed her messenger bag from the table. "Alright Sensitive Sally, you're going to need to buck up and dive into those files. What if there are clues in there?"

A wave of nausea washed over him. He had no desire to see any pictures or - God help him - videos of Jemma and Will looking happy together. And now, with what Bobbi just told him about the cage, he'd have to brace himself for the possibility of seeing something worse. "If we find something, I don't want to keep any secrets from her."

He was still stinging from her overwhelming disappointment with him over Daisy's altered DNA tests.

"Don't worry, Fitz." Bobbi rose from the table. "If I come across something before you do that suggests he treated her less than kindly, there's not a planet far enough for Will Daniels to go where I won't get to him." With a mock salute, she left the coffee shop and mounted a Yamaha bike parked outside.

Lincoln opened his wallet and tossed $20 on the table, then grabbed Fitz by the elbow and tugged him out of the restaurant. "You're not looking good."

Fitz was dizzy with anger. The moment they reached the outside, Fitz turned and slammed his fist into the wall, breaking the skin on his knuckles. "I know this makes me a horrible person - and mind you, I never would - but I've thought about it..."

Lincoln grabbed Fitz's forearms to keep him from hurting himself again. "Leaving his ass there? You're not the only one."

There was no judgement in his eyes, only empathy, but it didn't stop Fitz from sinking even deeper into his pit of shame. "He put her in a cage, Lincoln. What kind of sick fuck could - could do something like that to somebody as sweet as Jemma?"

"A sick fuck who has been trapped on a deserted planet for the last 14 years. His people skills might be a little rusty, you know? We have no idea what he's been through."

"Of course." Fitz wiped the tears from his cheek and nodded. "I just need this to be over."

"Come on." Lincoln wrapped an arm around Fitz's shoulders and held on to his roommate's bloody hand by the wrist. "Daisy is stopping by to watch a movie. Maybe it'll help take your mind off things for a while?"

 

* * *

 

 

At the sound of the knock, Fitz got up from the couch where he was using his laptop, and shouted to his roommate, "I've got it."

Lookjng through the peep hole, his eyes widened. Daisy wasn't alone.

Fitz fumbled with the lock a few times before finally getting the door open. "You're, um, hi. I just wasn't expecting..."

Jemma looked uncomfortable in her own skin. "I know I didn't call first. I can--"

"No. No, I said any time and I meant it." He stepped aside to let both women in. "Hi Daisy."

"I call your bed," she said, bypassing a hug and going straight for the couch, which she dramatically flung herself onto. "What? It's comfy."

Jemma's eyes fell straight to Fitz's bandaged hand, and she frowned. "You're hurt?"

He shut the door, then instinctively tucked his arm behind his back. "It's nothing. Tea?"

Daisy made a gagging sound, picked up Fitz's laptop and started to play around with it. "We're here to have fun, not tuck ourselves into bed on a cold night."

He crossed the room in three strides, wrenching the computer from Daisy's hands and folding it closed in one motion. "Yeah? Well, I wasn't talking to you, was I?"

"I'd love a cup." Jemma gave him a tentative smile, then with a questioning look, pointed toward the direction of kitchen. "I can--"

"Make it? No. You're a guest."

"A guest?" She made a disgusted face and headed toward the kitchen. "I haven't been your guest since freshman year at the academy when I invited myself over for a study session."

Daisy jerked her head toward the kitchen, a silent order for Fitz to go after her.

Despite his desire to run in the opposite direction, he did as he was told and followed Jemma inside.

* * *

 

Jemma was on the balls of her feet, rifling through a high cabinet when he walked through the open doorway. "Honestly, Fitz. I leave you alone for one minute and this is how you live?"

Several boxes of tea fell onto her head and he moved into her personal space to catch them.

"Sorry," he said, handing her a box of PG Tips to put back.

Her breathing stuttered. "No. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have--"

"It's fine."

"It's not." She placed the box down on the counter with the others. "I wasn't careful. I disrupted the whole thing and ruined everything."

They'd obviously stopped talking about tea several sentences ago.

Lately, almost everything they said to each other was coded as something else. It was safer that way.

Fitz leaned over her and put every box back but the Earl Grey. "You didn't ruin anything. I promise." His hand lingered on the cupboard door.

She placed her hand over his and pushed the door shut. "You haven't - um - did you have a chance to look at my phone files, yet?"

He shook his head, finding it odd her expression was so hopeful. She probably had some photos of Will she'd wanted to recover to put on her nightstand. "Guess you're not the only one who wasn't ready."

"I'm ready now, though." She pushed past him to the sink and filled the kettle from the stove top with water. "It would mean a lot to me if you could just - just look at everything. I've always appreciated having you as my second pair of eyes."

"Yeah. Of course." Fitz lifted two clean mugs from the drying rack and placed the tea bags inside.

She was standing so close to him now. As close as she'd been the day they'd kissed. "Today? Please?"

He took a deep breath and nodded, then moved out as far out of her space as he could get in the tiny kitchen area.

Despite Jemma's encouraging smile, she looked vaguely disappointed. "Fitz, I was thinking about the portal location and I had a few ideas."

"Okay."

"Afterlife was located on the Tibetan Plateau, in the Chinese city of--"

"--Xinjiang--"

"-- on the Northern 39th parallel." She smiled, caught up in the excitement. "You know what else is along the 39th parallel?"

Fitz thought for a moment, mentally flipping through his vast stores of random information for anything pertinent. "Nyingchi? Where Jaiying was born?"

"I know it could just be a coincidence, but Jaiying had been guarding inhumans from the monolith for decades, so perhaps it wasn't only the monolith she was afraid of? Maybe she knew about the portals as well?"

"Jem, are you saying you think a portal--"

"--might possibly exist along the same latitude as those two places. It makes sense, right? If the portal is fixed and the Earth's rotation is what changes its location, wouldn't it make sense?"

He took a moment to process the new information. "Kabul."

She quirked an eyebrow at him.

"The place where I found--"

"The scroll. Right. I assume that's not where it was originally from?" She asked.

"No. It was found in a town called Eskişehir, in Turkey, not far from the Iraqi border."

"Let me guess...it's also along the 39th parallel?"

He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped in the name of the city. "Yeah."

"Interesting." She took a spoon from the drying rack and busied herself stirring their tea. "By the way Fitz, that was an awfully reckless thing to do. Going to Morocco the way you did."

He hid behind the fridge door, taking longer than necessary to locate the milk. "I know."

She pressed the door of the fridge shut, exposing him. "If something had happened to you..."

"Nothing did. I'm fine." He brushed off Jemma's concern, not wanting her to feel guilty about it. He made the choice to go, and had been prepared to live - or not - with the consequences of it. He knew she would have disapproved, but she wasn't there to tell him that herself, which was the reason he'd gone in the first place. "I know how to walk softly and carry a big stick."

He was about to add milk to her mug, when she stopped him with her hand.

"Don't. Don't minimize the risk you took." Her breath hitched, a simmering rage just beneath the surface of her words. "That was so stupid. So incredibly stupid. Promise me, you'll never do something like that again."

Fitz continued pouring the milk. "You know I can't, and I don't want to lie to you."

She shook her head at him like a disappointed parent. "Silly, stupid Fitz."

"You used to copy my quantum physics notes. If I'm silly and s-stupid, what does that make you?" He smirked at her, before putting the milk away.

He could feel the weight of her stare on the back of his neck. "Lucky."

 

* * *

 

There were scores of cities along the 39th parallel, spanning the globe from Palermo to Pyongyang. They would have to find a way to narrow it down, or at least find a pattern, before they set off to investigate. Otherwise, they could be traveling in circles. They'd already agreed that they'd try to start with the possible portal locations closer to home, to save themselves the trek.

Also, Fitz couldn't exactly disappear at whim to follow up leads like he used to at S.H.I.E.L.D., because despite Lincoln's medical expertise, he wasn't much of a researcher. His friend would hardly be able to cover for him as well as Bobbi had.

Daisy said she'd set up an alert for any unusual spikes in energy levels along 39th, using a thermal imaging map. It so happened that Washington D.C. ran along the 39th parallel, so that would be as convenient a place to start as any.

A pair of heels clicked across the lab floor and settled at his side. "How are you settling in, Dr. Fitz?"

Rosalind Price's voice always had a sarcastic edge to it, Fitz thought. It shouldn't have surprised the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. team that Coulson got along so well with her, even if it did concern them.

"Swimmingly." He slotting his pen between his teeth for safe keeping, before leaning back in his roller chair.

Her lips pursed with an expression halfway between amused and annoyed. "Good to see you're making herself at home."

Fitz sat up a little straighter and removed the pen. "Did you, um, want something in particular, Ma'am?"

"As you know, I'm paying you quite a bit. So, I'd just like to know if I'm getting my money's worth?"

He lifted a finger to hold her off, then pulled out the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and removed a futuristic-looking gun from its case.

She tilted her head to the side. "What am I looking at?"

"The Chill-out Gun," he said, presenting it forward.

She took it from him and tested the weight of it in her hands. "Nice. Also, I've decided we're not calling it that."

"That's what it's called," he mumbled under his breath. "You said I could pick."

"I pay the bills, I get to pick the names." She lined the gun up against a large cloth target he'd set up and pulled the trigger. "Fore!"

A blast of cold shot across the lab and landed square in the middle of the mark. Dead accurate.

Fitz kicked himself off the desk and wheeled across the room to the target, touched it with the end of his pen, and the entire sheet shattered like glass.

"Very cool." Rosalind's eyebrows rose, impressed. "Pun intended."

"It has - there are different settings. I posit we might be able to use low temperature to slow down Lash's metabolic processing, maybe inhibit his ability to produce energy?"

She was more delighted than he'd ever seen. "And I'm the only one who has a prototype of this? This isn't something you've built for Coulson?"

Fitz nodded, phrasing his answer in a way that wouldn't be an outright lie. "You're the only one I've ever built one of these for. It's the only, um, prototype." For now.

He'd have to warn Mack to at least change the outer casing to make it look different at first glance.

"The Chill-out Gun, eh?" she asked, words sticking on her tongue like she hated herself for getting used to them. "Nice work, agent."

She winked, acquiescing to the name.

"Thank you, ma'am"

* * *

 

He hadn't even waited for the door to shut behind her when he brought up the recovered files from Jemma's phone.

"Bloody hell. Two moons?" The first photo was of the planet - blue, as dark and forbidding as it was treacherous - and it left him breathless.

He'd spent hours star-gazing with Jemma during their down time at the academy, on the roof of their dorm, passing a bottle of red wine between them. They would often talk about the possibility of life in other solar systems, what the terrain might be like, what kind of flora and fauna might have grown there, but he'd never imagined something like this.

Fitz checked himself for the momentary stab of jealousy that hit him in the gut. His best friend lived a tortured existence for longer than he felt comfortable thinking about. This kind of knowledge could hardly have been a solace to her.

He flipped the next few photos quickly until one of them caught his eye.

Will. And he was touching Jemma, looking very much the doting boyfriend. And she seemed almost...happy, being handled by a man who had once kept her in a cage.

He felt instantly sick.

Fitz jumped up from his chair and knocked a pile of papers to the floor with a curse, then kept on walking, too much agita to stay in one place.

He'd almost rounded the corner when he froze at the sound of her voice. "Fitz, it's Jemma."

Like beacon in a storm, it drew him back to his desk, word by word.

"Do you remember when we first met? I do. You were so quiet and pasty. And so incredibly smart, handsome. Quite a strange feeling isn't it? Never wanting to be without someone..."

She took a deep breath as if struggling to breathe, and Fitz instantly pushed his fears about Will to the side. Jemma was suffering and though she was safe now, it killed him to watch.

He collapsed into his chair and rested his chin on steepled hands, damp eyes riveted to the screen as he tried not to scream.

"You must have been so annoyed, me following you around all the time..."

"No." He wiped away the tears that rolled generously down his cheeks. "Never."

"I imagine our dinner sometimes...where we'd go, what we'd eat. I wonder about us a lot actually..."

 

* * *

 

It was well past 4am by the time he arrived at her door, but Fitz was too far gone and irrational to care.

Jemma hadn't been sleeping well, so he knew there was a good chance she'd be up, but as he lifted his hand to knock, a moment of panic gripped him.

From the sounds of the recordings - the things she had said - everything he'd ever assumed about the two of them had been wrong. His entire world view had been tipped on its end and there was no way he could be expected to process all of this by himself.

All of those months - years, even - she'd kept her feelings a secret, locked up tighter than one of her prized vials of antiserum. Except, he knew what was inside of those formulas, she'd never had a problem sharing science with him. It was what the things inside of her she'd been withholding the whole time.

Fitz wasn't sure if he should be angry with Jemma because she didn't think she could confide that in him, or angry at himself for making her feel that way. It was no one's fault. It was just a mess and all of his carefully constructed walls were now a pile of ash.

The worst part about it was that despite everything - even knowing she'd at least returned his affections at some point - they'd still missed their window. Will blew into her life and replaced him.

Fitz was destined to fail, like Charlie Brown, always kicking the ball one second too late.

He rapped out their special knock on the door and it swung open immediately, almost as if she'd been waiting up for him.

"Can I ask you something?" He said, brushing past her into his old room. "Did you ever - were you just being nice, agreeing to go out with me to dinner before?"

Jemma slowly shut the door, an uncharacteristically timid expression on her face. "No. I wanted to go."

He paced the floor, back and forth past her immobile frame, unable to look at her. "Why did you - was it pity - why did you kiss me?"

She remained in place, tight as a violin string poised to snap. "Because, I wanted to."

Fitz ran his hands through his hair and finally stood in front of of her, fists pressing into his waist. "I didn't know you thought about settling down in Perthshire. That's in Scotland."

Jemma smiled and let out a shaky breath, like she was relieved. "I know where it is, Fitz."

"When you said those things about - I mean - you were tired and dehydrated..."

"I was as clear headed then as I've ever been..." her voice was soft but sure, like she explaining something scientific to a layman," ...when I said all those things."

He turned to her - dumbfounded - but she now she was the one who couldn't meet his eyes. "Oh."

Jemma cleared her throat and inched minutely closer to him. "So...what do you think we should do about it?"

Fitz stared at her, unable to speak. He hadn't thought it ever possible. Was this really happening? His mind had played tricks on him before, but never like this.

"I--" He shook his head. The way she was looking at him now - hopeful yet scared - like he held the power to crush her with one word, left no doubt in his mind: she loved him. And not just as a friend.

He wished he had the words to encompass everything he was feeling, but it had always been easier to show her than to speak.

Fitz took two strides forward and pulled Jemma into his arms. A surprised breath caught in her throat as he paused above her, unsure.

Her expression turned sly and encouraging. "Well?"

He pressed his lips to hers, hesitantly at first, but when her arms wrapped around his neck and pulled his body closer he checked all his inhibitions and deepened the kiss. His fingers threaded through her hair, cradling her head in place, and she sighed into his mouth.

Pausing for a moment, he stuttered out, "Was that o--?"

"Yes," she whispered against his lips, pulling him back down into another kiss. "Whatever you're about to ask me, the answer is yes."

He never thought he'd have this, that she'd want him in this way. But her neck was flushed and her lips red and slick from his, and the amount of desire in her eyes was overwhelming. "But, what about--?"

She cut him off with another kiss. He knew they needed to talk, but he couldn't bring himself to stop her. Whatever place he held in the hierarchy of her heart didn't matter tonight. She wanted him, and he knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. If she was offering any part of herself to him - however ephemeral - he would take it gladly.

His hands smoothed down the length of her spine, mapping every bump and ridge along the way. Whatever this was, even if was temporary, he wanted to remember every detail. "Are you sure you wan--"

"Ugh, Fitz!," she hissed in his ear - frustrated - and punctuating his name with a nip to the earlobe. "Am I being too subtle or something?"

"No." Embarrassed laughter bubbled up from inside. "Nope. Not subtle at all, actually."

"Good." She leaned back, lips curling into a wicked grin, before pulling him closer by his collar.

"I just - I didn't expect--"

"What? That I'd ...um...feel the same?" Her smile dropped off, suddenly. "Oh God, you still feel...? I was so worried when you found out about--"

"--Will? No. At this point, I doubt anything short of you committing genocide could change how I feel about you."

"And how do you feel?" She blinked up at him, petrified.

His fingers trailed across her collar bone and she leaned into it. "I jumped through space and time to find you, Jemma. You can't guess?"

Her lips were on his again, relentless, barely giving him space to answer. He couldn't breathe, but if this was how he was going to die, he would think it was worth it.

It would have been easy to lose himself in her that night. Too easy. But there was a shadow in the room, inching ever closer to them, and it would never stop. Not until they brought Will home and she could stand in front of both of them and choose the life she wanted for herself.

She may have indicated that she loved Fitz, but he didn't know what her feeling for Will were, and that information was just as vital. Too bad she didn't leave any recordings about that.

Jemma pushed Fitz toward the bed and he stumbled back onto it, taking her with him. She landed on top of him with a thud and he quickly flipped them over so he was above her, arms bracketing her head.

Fitz stared down at her, drinking in the bothered state he'd been responsible for getting her into, and felt a surge of pride. His fingers traced her features reverently, starting with her expressive eyes, then her adorable nose and finally the swell of her bottom lip, which he grazed with the tip of his thumb. "I've thought about this a lot."

Her knees leaned against his sides and he was already half-hard where she pressed herself against his stomach. She pushed him over so she could roll on top again. "Me too. And I've had a lot more free time on my hands, so I have plans."

Squeezing his eyes closed, he expelled a huff of frustration. "Jemma, we--"

"If you say 'can't', I will feed you to the Monolith myself." Her hair fell like a curtain around his face, penning him in. "Please don't. Please Fitz."

Fitz was dizzy with want, breathing hard from exercising restraint, but he had to think of the long run. Somebody did. She rose and fell against his chest with each heavy pant. "I want this to happen - God, so much, Jem - but not like this. Okay?"

She looked into his eyes, slightly less heartbroken than before, and dropped one chaste kiss on the side of his mouth. "Okay. Okay."

Rolling into the empty spot next to him on the bed, she reached her hand out for his, and he gladly took it.

"What are we supposed to do now?" Jemma's voice cracked on the last word, and he could hear fresh tears in her voice.

He brought their joined hands to his heart. "We could just...go outside and watch the sunrise? For now?"

"Okay." She dropped her head onto his chest and let her fingers wander to his stomach, where they unconsciously stroked the thin strip of skin exposed by his rucked up shirt. "You know how I love a good sunrise."

"Aye." Fitz leaned over and pressed a kiss to the top of her head, hoping he didn't blow his one and only chance at happiness with her. "I do, Jemma."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remind me again why I thought it would be a good idea to write while canon was still happening? Am I a masochist?
> 
> You'll have to let me know how I'm doing with incorporating all of the new show developments. I'm trying to keep the story original, but I also don't want to ignore things like the freaking Perthshire cottage(!!!) and Jemma's soap opera come-ons. Because golddust, ammiright?
> 
> Still enjoying? Please let me know what's working for you and what you'd like to see. All of your feedback is so appreciated and helpful.
> 
> Thanks for sticking with this fic!
> 
> (I'll be thinking of you all on Tuesday as I cry into my throw pillow!)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fitz and Jemma have the 'talk', a new development helps them get closer to finding the portal, and Lash resurfaces in the worst way possible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this chapter from the grave, because that fitzsimmons kiss was the end of me. Ugh.
> 
> Big thanks to notapepper for beta'ing this chapter for me!

Dueling alarms rang through Jemma's head in cacophony, dragging her from her sleep.

She hadn't been called out on a S.H.I.E.L.D. field mission since she'd been home, but the unmistakable strains of Fitz's 'Secret Agent Man' coming from his side of the bed alerted her to the seriousness of the calls.

_Since when had that become his side of the bed?_

It would have been too much of a coincidence for both of their phones to buzz at once, and if the ACTU was involved in this crisis, it couldn't mean anything good.

Fitz reached for his phone, accidentally knocking it to the floor in the process. "Shite."

Jemma was about to answer her own, when Daisy burst into the room, unannounced.

"Jemma, we--oh. Crap." Daisy covered her eyes quickly, but couldn't stop herself from tittering. "Okay, I was _not_ expecting that."

"Shh..." Fitz pulled Jemma's pillow out from under her head and put it on top of his face to block out the sound. "Like a flock of geese, you are."

"Gaggle, Fitz." Jemma looked over at him with a resigned sigh, regretting they didn't have more time to talk. After watching the sunrise in virtual silence, they'd gone back to her bunk and fallen straight asleep with nothing resolved. "You can uncover your eyes, Daisy. We're decent."

"Yeah, some of us more than others. Shh!" Fitz huffed irritably and turned onto his side, pressing the pillow more firmly over his ears.

"Oh." Daisy sounded disappointed as her hand dropped to her waist, but then quickly entered the room and shut the door behind her. "Who sleeps with jeans on?" She waved a hand in Fitz's direction.

"Can we help you with something urgent?" Jemma asked through clenched teeth.

"Yeah, um, Lash. He's at it again. And Mack's on the fucking rampage, so..." She hooked her thumb toward the hallway and added an accompanying sound effect.

Jemma nodded and glanced over at Fitz. "Give us five minutes?"

Daisy nodded, but hesitated before leaving. "I - uh - got a hit last night. Off the hydrothermal scan I set up to monitor the North 39th parallel. I tried to call, but..." She sent Jemma a pointed look. "Guess you were too busy to hear the phone?"

A tidal wave of guilt passed over Jemma, catching her off guard. She'd been so wrapped up in sorting out her feelings for Fitz that she'd neglected her search for Will, and now he'd have to spend another God-knows-how-long trapped on Planet Hell.

"Oh, can you please send me the coordinates and exact time of the peak? We can use it as a control, maybe predict when and where the next portal will open?"

"Of course." Daisy smiled softly, looking apprehensively from one of them to the other, before leaving.

Fitz was lying stiller than usual on the bed, but there was no doubt from the stiff line of his body he'd heard the development.

Jemma sank back down into the bed and curled up around him like a comma. "I know you're awake. I can tell by the shallow way you're breathing." She pulled the pillow from his face and bunched it up under her head.

Fitz squinted his eyes at the influx of light. "She got a ping? That's...yeah. That's...good."

For over a decade, being around Fitz felt as natural to Jemma as being alone. But, things between them were so amorphous now that she felt unsure of every touch and word. "Fitz, please talk to me?"

"Will. He could be back any day now, if things g-go according to plan." His jaw shifted, grinding his back teeth.

"Yes." Her fingers unconsciously curled around his bicep.

"Would you --" he turned his head to the side to look her in the eyes. "Do you love him, Jemma?"

This had been the one question she'd been dreading all along. Did she love him? If anybody had asked her that three months ago, the answer would have been an unequivocal yes. But now? In the light of her normal life and with Fitz sleeping by her side, she didn't know.

Some forms of love came on fast and fierce like a tropical virus, taking years to clear a person's system - if they ever really did. While other kinds of love imprinted themselves on your DNA, molding and changing with you as you grew, always there, fusing to become a part of who you were.

"I don't know. I think...yes?" Her fingers bit into his skin through his shirt.

At her admission, Fitz inhaled hard and expelled a breathy laugh. "Yeah, of course you do. Of course you do. He's strong and smart and you gave each other hope on the edge of nowhere."

He wasn't wrong, but to hear him phrase it like that, in an embittered tone she'd never experienced before, was gut-wrenching. "Don't do this, Fitz--"

"You think I didn't look for dirt on him? I did." He stopped for a moment and took a fortifying breath. "And there's nothing. I can't hate him. He's great. Why else would you fall for him? He did everything right."

He sounded defeated. Accepting the hand fate had dealt him, no matter how it destroyed him. He was a fighter by nature and this just seemed wrong.

Jemma couldn't let Fitz think this way about himself. As if he were incidental compared to Will, when he was so much more than that. So much better than anyone she'd ever known.

Her fingers migrated up to his face to keep him from looking away. "And you dove through a hole in the universe for me."

She kissed him this time, determined but gentle, with the force of over a decade of love behind it. One hand cupped the back of his head, teasing the hair at the nape of his neck as she pressed their lips together.

He was tentative at first, barely allowing himself to touch her, but with one more push forward his hands fell to her waist, grappling at the hem of her shirt.

Jemma had no idea it would feel like this, or even what _this_ even was, but every cell in her body seemed to vibrate at the same frequency as his, like they were destined to be joined. Matter couldn't destroyed, but it could change, and she could almost feel the space between them hum with possibilities.

She may have been confused about almost everything in her life, but of one thing she was certain: there wasn't any planet in any universe where she wouldn't love Leo Fitz.

He broke the kiss first and leaned into her, pressing his forehead against hers while they caught their breath. Her fingers remained on his cheek, the tips wet from a mixture of their tears.

She didn't know what she expected to see when she opened her eyes, but it wasn't an expression of pure anguish. Her stomach dropped as she realized it maybe hadn't felt the same for him.

"We're cursed," he whispered, his warm breath drifting pleasantly over her lips.

She leaned in to kiss him again, but he abruptly pulled away, sitting up. "We're cursed."

Jemma crawled across the mattress and sat next to him on the edge of the bed - inches apart - close enough to feel the heat from his skin but too far away to touch him. And, oh how she wanted to touch.

"It's the only explanation. The bloody cosmos want us apart." He nodded softly, agreeing with himself.

A pang of irritation rose from within. Since when did he ascribe to such tosh? "The cosmos don't _want_ anything, Fitz."

"There's no other explanation." He grabbed his phone from the floor and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans as he stood. "We had years together and it never even occurred to us. When it did, we didn't have the courage to say something. And now--?"

What she was doing to him was horrible enough to make him question science, and for that alone she was deeply ashamed. "I would give anything--"

"We're cursed to be apart. And that's just the way it is," he mumbled, cutting her off, then slipped out of the door without looking back.

That's when Jemma realized, while she thought they were finally starting something, this was Fitz's way of finishing it. She had inadvertently given him the closure he needed and she'd never felt worse.

* * *

 

The first thing Jemma noticed when she entered the Cocoon headquarters, was how barren it was, forgotten, like so many of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s formerly bustling offices.

The second thing she noticed was May, chained to a filing cabinet by her leg as Phil Coulson tried to talk Dr. Garner down.

"Oh God," she hiccuped a breath at the tenuous sight and turned to Daisy with a look of dread.

"Lincoln's here." Daisy tapped a message into her phone and started to walk away.

"Wait - Fitz! Is he--"

"I don't know, Jemma." Daisy shrugged as she walked off. "I don't know."

Jemma hid behind the wall of the room where the scene was taking place, doctor's bag at the ready in her hand. She still hadn't a clue how she ended up doing so much medic work when she'd never attended a day of medical school, but they trusted her with their lives, and she was determined not to let them down.

"This isn't you! You would never say that!" May's tone was so strained and desperate, Jemma questioned for a moment who was speaking.

"No, Melinda, I know exactly what I'm saying."

She recognized Dr. Garner's voice straight away, she'd spent many hours listening to it from across the room. It was unfathomable to her what was happening. He'd always been so helpful, such a champion for inhumans, those who needed support during their lowest hour, and now he was murdering them? He's told May he sensed a defect in them, a darkness that needed to be eradicated. They were flawed.

Her mind flashed back to her conversation with Daisy the other week, how Fitz had supported her after her transformation, told her she was just different now and that it was okay. She wondered if her position had come across as harsh to Fitz as Garner's was coming across to her right now. She cringed, remembering how she'd suggested people like Raina be put down like sick animals if they couldn't be controlled.

She didn't want anybody to put Dr, Garner down. She knew what he was inside and it wasn't this. Maybe Raina hadn't been what she initially thought, either?

Behind her, the sharp scrape of metal across a wood floor gave her a start.

Mack drew up beside her, looking as serious as a heart attack and just as deadly. An axe head resting precariously in the palm of his hand.

"Maybe he can still be saved?" she whispered, knowing full well Mack's mind had been made up since before he'd arrived.

"He's murdered over a dozen people. There's no coming back from that."

"There's always hope," she said, sounding as hollow as she felt.

A spiderweb of lightening tore across the ceiling like creeping ivy, accompanied by the unmistakable crackle of electricity. Lincoln's hands were raised in the air, looking like a deranged maestro whose orchestra had just fucked up the final aria of an opera.

Before she could figure out what was happening, a familiar figure jumped in front of him with outstretched hands. "Don't do this, Lincoln."

Lincoln tried to brush Fitz aside, but Fitz held his ground. "It won't bring your friends back. It - it won't bring you peace."

"This isn't about peace, Fitz! You don't just let a rabid dog run free!"

"So freeze him," he said, holding a funny-looking gun out to Lincoln. "Chill him out and be done with it, yeah?"

 _Donnie's freeze ray._ A shiver shot down Jemma's spine.

It was just like before, with Fitz putting himself in danger, but he'd grown reckless with time. So very reckless. And deep down she knew she was the reason why.

She opened her mouth to say something, to call him away to safety, but the words dried in her throat.

Lincoln shoved Fitz out of the way. "I don't need your weapon, Fitz. I _am_ a weapon."

Fitz started after him, but was overtaken by Daisy, who pulled up beside Lincoln, taking control over the situation with a wave of her hand.

With lungs heaving greatly, Fitz rubbed the sweat from his face against his sleeve and fell against the nearest wall, gun clutched tightly to his chest. When he'd finally gotten his bearings he tilted his head up and looked directly at Jemma, like he'd always known she was there.

 _I'm sorry_ she mouthed, not sure exactly what she was apologizing for this time, but it seemed like it was owed.

Fitz nodded his head once at her, then straightened his back and carried on along in Daisy and Lincoln's wake, like a man with nothing to lose.

* * *

 

Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage later, May had Andrew cornered near the containment unit. The doctor was stuck halfway between man and beast, and nothing Mack or Lincoln had thrown his way had made a dent. 

"Go on. Might as well," May said, staring Andrew down. 

"Melinda, don't." Dr. Garner was having trouble speaking, mouth contorted by the changing shape of his face.

"I've thought about my death enough times the different ways that I could go. I just never thought it'd be you." May was pointing a gun with live ammunition directly at her ex-husband's chest. "I never knew why you married me. I was never as kind and empathetic as you. That's why it was so easy for me to walk away, why I gave up on you."

May's words cut Jemma to the quick and her legs started to go weedy. It was like May had rummaged through her mind and emptied out the contents. Maybe Jemma's feelings of guilt and self-loathing weren't as rare as she'd imagined? After all, May felt this way long before Andrew had turned into a killer.

"I lost something when I left you. I won't do it again. But you have to stop this." May cried, lifting her gun.

Andrew made a move and she fired the gun in rapid succession, four bullets to the chest. It debilitated him enough to buy the team some time, but he still wasn't down.

Then a shot of cold air blew through the room, hitting Andrew head on, freezing him in his tracks. Fitz nearly toppled from the force of the gun, but just managed to remain on his feet.

"Nice work, Dr. Fitz," Rosalind regarded him with a meaningful look and then gestured for her people to remove Andrew's prone form. They followed orders, promptly dragging his body into the containment unit.

Jemma took a small step toward Fitz, but was cut off by Lincoln, throwing his arms around his friend. The two men hugged like they hadn't seen each other in years, and Jemma's heart clenched at the sight.

She was happy for Fitz. She was. But part of her felt like she'd lost something dear she'd never get back. He had new friends who cared about him, a job he was respected at, an entire other existence. He'd positively flourished without her in his life. What could she possible offer him besides uncertainty and more heartache?

If she really did love him - and she did - wouldn't it be better to let him go? Let him rebuild a life for himself without the spectre of their failed _whatever_ following him around like a bad odor? He needed his freedom, he was practically chafing under the yoke of their complicated friendship.

Jemma wiped a tear from her cheek and walked toward the exit, doing her best not to turn around when she heard him faintly call her name.

 

* * *

 

A long walk by the Potomac did nothing to sort out Jemma's head, but she hadn't really expected it to. She'd probably have to cross an entire country like one of those barefoot Kenyan runners, before she gained any clarity from a simple walk.

It was quiet when she'd gotten back to the base. Most of the crew had gone out, some drinking to celebrate, some to forget, and some a mixture of the two.

She couldn't face anybody after her revelation today. Could barely face herself. And the one person she felt comfortable talking to about it was deep in a containment unit perched on some high shelf at ACTU headquarters. She idly hoped Fitz might visit Dr. Garner to check on him.

As Jemma entered the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea, she heard laughter coming from the far corner.

High on a countertop sat Daisy, with Lincoln standing between her legs, his fingers resting lightly on her hips as she tilted a Fizzy Lizzy soda bottle toward him.

"This time, see if you can get it all in your mouth," she said, snickering as she tipped the bottle too far, wetting the front of his shirt.

"It would help if you'd actually let me drink my own drink like a grown man." He might have sounded exasperated, but Simmons thought he looked quite smitten.

"Probably." Daisy sighed, dramatically, "But where's the fun in that?"

Jemma cleared her throat to make her presence known. "Hello Sk-Daisy. Lincoln." 

It had been ages since she'd last flubbed Daisy's name.

Gracefully ignoring the gaffe, Daisy pointed to the fridge. "Bobbi bought concord grape Fizzy Lizzy and grape juice Lizzy. Hunter apparently was unclear which grape he wanted, so she just got both. There's a ton in there, so help yourself."

"Thanks, but I think I'll stick with the old standby tonight." Jemma opened up one of the cabinets and pulled down a box of chamomile, hoping it would help calm her nerves.

Her movements were jerkier than normal as she prepared her cup, turning on the kettle with a shaky flip of the switch. "Fitz around?" She was aiming for casual, but her voice was an octave too high with an uneven pitch she was sure gave the game away.

"Boiler Room and beyond," Daisy said, her hand poised atop Lincoln's shoulder. "That's what Hunter said, at least."

Jemma sent Lincoln a tight smile. "You didn't want to join the boys?"

"I'm recovering." He tapped the NA chip around his neck and reached for the bottle of fruit soda in Daisy's hand, which she promptly held out of reach.

"Oh." Jemma's cheeks burned with embarrassment. "Good for you." Internally, she cringed at herself.

"You could always go down there," he said, after a full minute of silence. "Fitz would probably be really happy to see you."

Unable to just stand there with nothing to focus on, she turned the kettle off before it finished boiling and busied herself pouring lukewarm water into her mug. "Oh, I'm sure he'd rather spend time with just the guys."

"That's not true," he lobbied back, almost too quickly, an edge to his voice. "You know damn well that's not true."

As a warning, Daisy's hand dropped heavily onto his shoulder, giving herself a shock in the process. "Ouch, Lincoln. Spark much?"

"Sorry." He took her hand in his and massaged the feeling back into it, while at the same time stepping away. "Lost control there for a minute."

Daisy shrugged and wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him back into place. "Happens to the best of us. Stop sulking."

Jemma smiled at the two of them, so comfortable in each other's company. She'd had that once, before her entire life was stolen from her at the bottom of the ocean.

She'd pinpointed that time as the moment things had started going South for her. Before then, she'd been perfectly happy with Fitz, spending days in their lab, nights curled up on the couch watching tv. There was a lot unsaid that they kept inside - she knew that now - but they'd still been very happy.

But then Fitz gave his life for hers and came out of the water a different man, like a baptism gone awry.

And, despite their compatibility, shared interests and all the enormous love they had for each other, they'd never truly been able to get their easy, effortless connection back. She ached with the pain of what she'd lost.

More than any other reason, _this_ was why she'd once vowed to kill Grant Ward. He'd set her life on a course from which she could never return.

"Thank you," Jemma started saying, before catching herself. _Thank you for being such a good friend to him._

The words echoed in her head. It was deja vu. They didn't go over so well with the last guy she'd said them to, so why did she think they'd make a difference with Lincoln?

Lincoln and Daisy both sent her questioning looks.

"For today. For helping us capture Dr. Garner alive," Jemma added, realizing immediately how incongruous that sounded, given Lincoln's extremely vocal desire to put the other man down.

"I wish I could say I wanted to capture him alive...but I guess I'm just happy he's off the streets. I'm not totally on board with all of the S.H.I.E.L.D. protocol, but Jaiying was wrong about what you guys do. Your intentions aren't all bad."

"See? I told you I'm not working for an evil illuminati cult." Daisy rubbed the back of her knuckles against his shoulder. "We only perform ritual sacrifices to appease our demonic entity when he gets angry. And also, only on Thursdays. Our demon does not like to miss 'Empire'. Big fan of Cookie Lyon."

He smirked at her. "Who isn't?"

 _Ritual sacrifices_. Will called himself that once, when recounting all of the people who had perished on the desolate plains of the blue planet. Jemma was safe now, standing in a kitchen drinking lukewarm tea, having selfishly left him there to die.

She grabbed the side of the countertop to keep herself upright. "Any more pings off the scanner?"

Daisy pulled her phone from her pocket and tapped out a long series of numbers. "Just sent you the info. We got another hit about 20 minutes ago. Exactly 18 hours to the minute after the last one."

"18 hours?" Jemma remembered the number 18 from her portal calculations on the blue planet, but she thought at the time it was in years. "What we're the coordinates?"

"Zimblurghistan? Something like that?"

Lincoln laughed. "Did you just make up a country?"

Daisy's eyes shifted skittishly. "No. Um, that's totally a country. I think. Probably. I may have gotten some of the letters wrong."

"Uh-huh." He couldn't keep the grin from his face.

"What? You're suddenly a member of the U.N.?" Daisy nudged his butt with the back of her heel.

Feeling intrusive, Jemma faked a big yawn, "Well, I'm really knackered from - you know - from today. I'm going to have a lie down for a bit." She made a show of stirring her cold tea, even though she had no intention of drinking it, figuring she'd have to sneak down later to fix a proper cup. "Let me know if anything pops up, yes?"

"Sure thing," Daisy said, with a nod. "Oh hey - should I also forward the portal info to Fitz?"

Jemma hesitated at the door. She'd asked enough of Fitz. He'd never be able to move on without her letting go of him first. To burden him with anything else felt selfish. "No, don't bother him with it. I've got it handled."

Who was she kidding? Absolutely nothing about her life felt handled at the moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying so hard to weave canon into this fic in a meaningful way, so please let me know if it's working or seems forced.
> 
> Okay, can we talk about that kiss? I both loved and hated it so much. Not sure why the writers always have to suck the fun out of every fitzsimmons interaction by inserting Hogface into the mix (their dinner date, her portal rescue, etc), but now that it looks like Will is definitely a once-real-now-shell person tricked into being a sacrifice or maybe some kind of low level Hydra stooge, I'm thinking this will resolve quickly. I'm just hoping Fitz doesn't totally move on from Jemma before this happens.
> 
> Also, I'm like 85% sure she either has implanted memories or has been glamoured by Will (who is possessed by the evil thing) into loving him, so she'll bring him back to Earth. Can you imagine Jemma's reaction when she figures out she's been used? Ugh. And what happens if the evil Hydra thing (in the guise of Will) really did fall in love with her and wants her as his evil Hydra bride? 
> 
> Somebody needs to stop me.
> 
> Please let me know what you think - your feedback means everything to me. Thanks for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternating Fitz/Jemma POVs, since we're approaching the end of the story.
> 
> Fitz falls back into old habits, an old friend surfaces, Jemma has a bad feeling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to notapepper for checking for typos, etc.

Avoidance was a time-honored tradition in the Fitz household. While he was growing up, Fitz threw himself into science to keep his mum from worrying about his lack of friends, spending hours locked in his dusty garage with scrap metal and a tool box. She, in turn, panic baked at the smallest allusion to his father or any hint that Fitz's life might have suffered from his absence. The were happy with their delusions, even if they were both aware that's what they were.

So, it seemed completely natural to Fitz to find another outlet for this, another way to distract himself from the parts of his life he'd rather forget.

"Didn't think you were going to call me again," Sam said, pressing her underwear into Fitz's hand as casually as if she were handing him her purse.

"I didn't. We just ran into each other, remember?"

"That's right. Guess I'm just lucky then." She backed him up against the red brick wall of the alley behind the Boiler Room, scraping the backs of his thighs in the process. His jeans were halfway down his legs, a condom already in hand.

"Sorry for not calling. Um, are you mad?" He did feel bad about not phoning, but with Jemma and his new job sapping all of his energy, he'd shut out everything else that required effort.

Her face may have appeared placid, but her body language was anything but. "Nope."

"Good." Fitz pressed her into the wall with one hand while snaking another up the front of her shirt.

Sam's teeth grazed the underside of his jaw, just the right side of painful. He didn't want to think about anything, just wanted to give himself over to the sensation.

He needed this. It was perfect.

She nipped at his earlobe, and his fingers tensed against the velvet skin of her stomach.

"Too rough?" she whispered into the shell of his ear, like the answer wasn't already poking her in the hip. "Well, Sci-ops?" She repeated the action with a sadistic chuckle.

Fitz responded with a sharp thrust against her pelvis.

"Okay, maybe not." She palmed the front of his boxers with deft fingers. "You're more amped up than usual tonight. Something happen?"

"Don't - I don't want to think, okay? Just wanna..." Fitz buried his face into her neck, setting a bite on her tendon so hard she gasped out loud.

Being a hothead may have been a Scottish stereotype, but for Fitz it happened to be true. He'd always been quick to temper, felt better after throwing or kicking something until he was spent. He snapped at his workers without much remorse, but he was able to keep the truly feral side of him hidden from view. The last thing he'd ever want is for somebody to feel unsafe with him, particularly a woman.

It wasn't Sam's fault he was a mess. She shouldn't have to suffer the fallout from his emotional maelstrom.

"Sorry." Fitz abruptly pulled back, averting his eyes to the floor, intensely ashamed of the bite mark he'd left behind. "I'm sorry. I didn't --"

She grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head back so she could look him in the face. "Don't be. I want it. I'll let you know if it gets to be too much."

He let out a shuddered breath and tightened his grip on her hips. "You're -- what?"

Sam kissed him until his lungs screamed for air, her fingers twisting tightly in his hair. "I don't know what her name is, but I definitely owe her a box of chocolates after this."

His brow furrowed. The situation with Jemma was the absolute last thing he wanted to think about right now. It was the whole reason he'd followed Sam outside for a quickie in the first place. "Her? I don't--"

"Come on." Sam's laugh spilled out like gravel, tripping him up. "I'm not jealous, Fitz. I know what this is."

Why deny it? Sam wasn't and would never be his girlfriend. Neither one of them was under any delusion about that. "Jemma. Her name is Jemma. And she's in love with somebody else."

"You sure about that, honey?" Her gaze softened, which wasn't what he'd intended to happen.

He wasn't interested in her pity. He didn't come out here for soft looks and gentle touches.

Her lips twisted into a wry smile. "Well, this Jemma sounds like an idiot."

The instinctive need to defend her burned in his chest, "She's not. She has two PhDs."

Sam playfully tugged at the loops of his jeans. "There are other ways to be stupid."

"No." Fitz wanted to be mad at Jemma, but he really couldn't. Being angry with a person for not loving you was as futile as it was controlling, and he wasn't that kind of man. Besides, Will seemed like the type who inspired devotion, and judging by Fitz's research, if wasn't hard to see why. "The guy - he's a goddamn astronaut, good looking. It makes sense she'd want that."

"Ouch." Her eyes crinkled at the edges. "Okay, I get why you're so hung up about it."

"I'm not hung up abou--I mean--what would a woman want with me if she could have that?" He absently gestured to the empty space above a line of covered recycle bins.

Eyelids heavy, she leaned in, stopping a few inches from his face. "I can think of a lot of things I'd want with you."

Fitz held her gaze for a long time, then took a breath and lunged forward, catching her bottom lip between his front teeth.

* * *

Fitz's sexual experience first began with a fumbling shag with an eager to please college girl who didn't know much more about intercourse than he did at the time. Then at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy, a few vanilla sessions with women with names like Claire and Emma.

His dry spell began the day he stepped foot on the bus, a state he truly didn't understand until the day Jemma threw herself out of the cargo hold of an airplane in front of his eyes. It ended the night Jemma told the story about Will.

None of that had prepared Fitz for clandestine shags in back allies with women called Switchblade.

He tugged his jeans up over his hips while she did the same. This was always the most awkward part, getting dressed in silence, figuring out a perfunctory but polite way to exit after sharing something so intimate.

"Do you want--" he had no idea what he was even offering her, but after what she'd just given him, he felt he should at least make some sort of gesture.

"No. That hit the spot just right." She finished buttoning her blouse and let her fingertips trail across the rash of stubble burn he'd left across her chest. "Well...maybe just a kiss goodnight. That would be nice."

"You're low maintenance."

She cupped the sides of his face and pressed her lips to the side of his mouth. "You're not."

He laughed and turned into the kiss, letting her control the pace.

It started out feather-light and soft, but quickly built too something vaguely terrifying in force. Fitz was giddy, his mind floating like an effervescent drink until the moment he suddenly fell weak.

When the skin on her hands started turning blue, he realized exactly what was happening. _Inhuman_.

He grappled for her shoulders to push her away, but the encroaching darkness came on too quickly and by the time she finally pulled back from the kiss he was fading fast.

 

* * *

Fitz's limbs were heavy, eyes too tired to open, but he was still nominally conscious, enough to work out two faint voices in the background discussing him. Just as he was able to focus enough to process what they were saying, he was lifted from the ground and tossed carelessly over the shoulder of another man in a fireman's carry.

"You're not gonna hurt him, right?" Sam sounded worried, which Fitz found ironic, considering she was the one who put him in this state.

"Hurt him?" Fitz knew that voice, that honeyed baritone, cloying and artificially saccharine. "No. He and I go way back."

"Promise?"

"Aww, are you sweet on him?" The man tutted, amused and condescending. "You can relax, Sam. He's no good to us dead."

"Well, at least let me remove the thing. I'm better with a knife than you are." The sound of a switchblade flipping open sent a shot of adrenaline rushing through Fitz's system.

He tried to raise his hand protectively to his left bicep, but all of his extremeties were dead weight. It was horrible, knowing exactly what was about to happen but not being able to do anything stop it.

"I'm so sorry, Fitz." A pair of lips pressed into the side of his head, seconds before he felt the tip of the blade slice through his flesh with precision.

 

* * *

 

When he finally opened his eyes, the world around him was all cobwebbed covered mirrors and fog. He was in the middle of a glass box, starched white sheets covering the bed he was lying on, a plastic cup filled with water waiting for him on a side table that had been bolted to the ground.

This kind of thing took planning. They had been prepared for him.

"Glad to see you're finally awake. You had us worried." An older man with an expensive-looking suit was sitting on a lone armchair in the middle of the room, surveying its contents like a feudal overlord.

Fitz sat up too quickly, forcing himself to grab the edge of the mattress for support. His left arm throbbed, but whatever they'd done to him had been repaired and expertly bandaged, which could only mean they wanted to keep him alive. "I highly fucking doubt that, considering you're the ones who put me in here. Aren't you?"

The man crossed the room until he reached the glass partition that separated them, and graced Fitz with a benevolent smile. "We mean you no harm, Mr. Fitz."

"It's doctor." He straightened his spine, not wanting to show weakness despite his predicament.

"My apologies - _Dr. Fitz_." The man made florid gesture of apology. "Are you well enough to speak?"

Fitz scanned the room to get an idea of the layout. "I'm speaking now, aren't I?"

"You can stop running through escape scenarios in your head, Dr. Fitz. We're didn't bring you here to hurt you."

"Pardon me, but that's not what it looks like from where I'm sitting...on a bloody hospital cot." He slapped the mattress.

"Please accept our apologies for reaching out to you like this, but it was the only way we could speak to you without any outside interference."

His eyes narrowed. "Outside like - like what? The ATCU?"

"Now, there's an irony." The older man laughed over a private joke with himself. "Our information was a little outdated. We were under the impression you were still working for S.H.I.E.L.D."

"No," Fitz crossed his arms over his chest. Being the only object in the room had him feeling exposed, like a lab specimen. "That's done with."

"Yes, well then that should make the transition a lot smoother for you." His tone was self-congratulatory enough to be worrying.

"Why would it m--" Fitz's head picked up, a rogue thought passing through his brain. "Transition to w-what?"

"You're a clever man. I think you can probably work it out."

HYDRA. It had to be. Government operatives couldn't afford Armani suits, and the guy's manners were more refined than anyone he'd seen in organized crime.

Fitz scowled, despite his better judgement. Getting angry wouldn't help the situation, but he'd never been one to pick self-preservation over self-control. "Don't tell me another one of you things grew back?"

The older man's face broke out into a broad smile. "My top man was right about you. I can see that now. You're certainly much more than you seem, which is a quality I value."

"Thanks?" Fitz shrugged, thrown off-kilter by the compliment. "Though I'm not sure how that's going to benefit you much, seeing as I'd rather die than help HYDRA do anything."

"You'll help. We have wa--"

"--ways of making people comply? Yes. Yes, I've read the manual." He rolled his eyes. "Like I said, I'm single, haven't got much in the way of family and I'm fully prepared to die, so there's virtually nothing you can do to me that could get me to help you program your DVR much less build a weapon for you."

A different man's voice called out from the doorway. "But, has anybody told you about our incentives program?"

A fresh wave of vertigo knocked Fitz off his base, sending him reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. This couldn't be real. It had to be a hallucination or a nightmare. He'd had similar ones before. "No. No. Not - God. Fuck you. Fuck you both!"

"Now, now, that's not a way to greet an old friend." Grant Ward walked slowly across the room, taking his sweet time, like a man with nowhere to be.

"You're not an old friend, you're a bloody psychopath!" Fitz rose to his feet and slammed his fist painfully against the transparent wall, praying for it to shatter. "And you!" He turned to the older man, hot breath fogging up the glass between them like an angry dragon. "I don't know who the fuck you are, but if you've hitched your wagon to this fucking prat, I can't imagine you're clever enough to pull off whatever you've kidnapped me to do for you."

The older man was completely unaffected by his outburst. "I like you, Dr. Fitz. Spirit is a good thing if funneled carefully toward a worthy cause."

"Yeah? And what worthy cause would that be?"

"Building bridges between different worlds," he said, punctuating the thought with a too wide grin. "Nothing more noble than that. Consider this a monumental opportunity to be a contributing force that changes our world for the better."

"You make it sound like you're trying to get me to join the Peace Corp." Fitz sneered at the man, knowing all too well that HYDRA didn't have any noble causes - at least none they didn't taint thoroughly with their unscrupulous methods. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

"You don't need to understand, Fitz. You just need to comply," Ward said, inserting himself between the men, licking his lips in glorious anticipation. "Compliance will be rewarded."

Fitz never wanted to punch somebody in the face more than Ward at that exact moment. "And if I don't comply?"

Ward sauntered the last few feet to the cell and pressed the face of his mobile phone against the glass for Fitz to see. "A lot of people find our incentives program to be a good source of motivation."

On a live video feed was Jemma, sitting on a park bench in their local green with a butcher-wrapped sandwich perched on her lap. She looked sad and rather tired, a far away look in her eyes, but she still the most beautiful thing Fitz had ever seen. He was glad to have been given one last chance to see her face before his certain death. "I'm going to kill you."

The corners of Grant's mouth curled upward. "Yeah. Your little girlfriend tried that once. Didn't really work out too well for her."

Fitz stared at the video feed of Jemma and felt the last vestiges of his will seep from his bones. "What do you want me to do?"

* * *

Sunlight had been a big draw for Jemma since she'd returned from the planet with everlasting night. Eating under the pale blue canopy of the sky had become a cherished pastime of hers.

But it was hard to enjoy today. The fraught way she'd left things with Fitz the night before kept her from finding pleasure in even in her most favorite things. It was like going to a nice restaurant with a headcold.

She wanted her lab partner back. She wanted her best friend. She just _wanted_.

With a flick of her hand, Jemma pulled the butcher's twine from her lunch and pressed her nose to the edge of the paper. Earth food still felt like a luxury.

It was strange tingling feeling at the back of her neck that pulled her from her thoughts.

Jemma's eyes flipped open and she took note of the people around her. She didn't know how, but she knew she was being watched.

Though intuition wasn't a real thing, bodies did register thousands of micro signals each day which their brains subconsciously molded into what people colloquially referred to as a 'feeling' or 'hunch'.

Whatever information her body was picking up from its surroundings, it didn't translate into anything good.

She stuffed her sandwich into her messenger bag and quickly left the area.

* * *

 

As Ward leaned against the glass wall that separated them, still watching the video feed of a Jemma, Fitz found himself wishing he were inhuman for the first time in his life. If he had powers like Daisy's, he could destroy the cage they'd put him in with one touch. If he had Lincoln's ability to manipulate electricity, he would be able to wipe the smug expression off his former friend's face with a twitch of his hand.

But the only super power Fitz had - all he ever had - was his mind. He would have to use it to the same effect.

"Still never pulled the trigger on that one, eh?" Ward angled the phone toward Fitz long enough for him to see Jemma walking off screen. She hadn't even stayed long enough to eat her lunch, so unless she was called away on an emergency, she'd known something was off. "You're a lot of things, but I never figured you for a coward."

Fitz scoffed at Ward's obvious attempt to get him riled up. "Well, I never figured you for - for a liar or a traitor, but here we are."

"See?" Ward snapped his finger in Fitz's direction as he slipped the phone into his jacket pocket. "That's what I'm talking about. I've been in the field with you - you've got more balls than sense - but never when it comes to her. It's a weakness."

"Dear Abby," Fitz sighed, and climbed back into bed, leaning back onto the pillow with his arms crossed over his head. "How do I get my asshole former coworker to stop butting his nose into my personal business?"

Ward chuckled to himself and tapped the glass to get Fitz's attention. "I know you won't believe me when I tell you this, but I've missed you."

Fitz scoffed. "I'm so fucking touched."

Ward's expression morphed into something fond. "You should do what Malick wants, Fitz. I don't want to have to hurt you."

"Yeah? Well, the feeling is definitely not m-mutual." He stretched his arms over his head, shaking off the last vestiges of whatever Sam had done to him. "Who's Malick? The old bloke?"

Ward slid to the ground and pressed his back up against the glass for support. "Old guard HYDRA. Used to sit on the security council."

"He as batshit crazy as he looks?"

Ward blew out a stream of air. "That's a matter of opinion."

Fitz flipped on his side to face Ward. "And what's your opinion?"

"My opinion is that you should probably avoid asking shit like that if you want to make it through this experience alive."

"I already know that's not happening, so I'll be as big of a wanker as I want to be, thank you."

Ward's head lolled to the side, catching Fitz's gaze. "You seem different. What happened to you."

He took a deep breath to control his anger, it was wasted energy. "You."

 

* * *

 

By the time Jemma got back to the lab, Bobbi had taken her place at the centrifuge machine.

Sensing she was there, the other woman waved a hand haphazardly over her head. "Hey. Didn't realize you'd be back so soon. You must've been hungry."

Jemma put her bag down on her work station and pulled the sandwich out again. "It's not that. I just - you know that feeling you get when somebody might be watching you?"

Bobbi's head picked up from examining her slides and she turned around in her chair. "You're being followed?"

"Yes?" Jemma sighed and tore open the paper around her sandwich. "I don't know. Maybe? I couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from, but I just had a distinct sense I was being--"

"Cased?"

Jemma nodded. "I'm probably just being paranoid."

"Better paranoid than dead." Bobbi set aside what she was doing and made her way over to her friend. "Honey, I know you're not a field agent, but you've been at this long enough to know when something is off. I'd trust your instincts if I were you, just to be safe."

"Thank you," she said, with a relieved smile. Lately, she could barely trust anything she was feeling, so to have her fears validated was a unique comfort. "You haven't - have you heard from Fitz at all today? He usually at least sends an email by this time to check-in, but nothing's come though. He also hasn't reaponded to any of my texts."

Bobbi worried her bottom lip, like she was debating whether or not to say something. "He, uh, might not be home yet?"

Jemma checked the time on her phone. "It's already half two."

"Daisy was at his place last night, said he never came home. The last time she saw him, he was with...company."

A ripple of nausea rolled through Jemma's stomach. "Oh. Well, surely he'd be back from... _that_ , by now, no?" Her fingers tightened around the prociutto sandwich she had yet to eat. "He never misses work, even when he's ill."

Bobbi's lips pursed in thought. "That hasn't been my experience with him, but, you know, there were extenuating circumstances."

Right. She'd forgotten about those.

"How unethical would it be if I asked Daisy to check the location of his tracker?" She braced for the answer, knowing full well the question made her seem like somebody's psycho ex-girlfriend. "I'm concerned for his safety."

"You sure that's all this is?" Bobbi tipped her head, expression skeptical. "I mean, if that's really what you want, we don't need Daisy for that. But, you might not like the answer."

The idea that Fitz might be in danger superseded any silly notion of jealousy. "Please?"

With a few keystrokes on Jemma's computer, Bobbi pulled up a list of active agents and their locations. She highlighted 'Leopold Fitz' and pulled up his recorded movements from over the last 24 hours. The transmissions ended at exactly at 2:12am.

"What does this mean?" Jemma asked, a cold feeling settling like lead in her stomach. "Did somebody extract the tracker?"

"The equipment could have failed," Bobbi suggested weakly, but she couldn't meet Jemma's gaze.

"Fitz designed those trackers," Jemma said, which was as good as saying they were fail-proof. "S-somebody had to have removed it from his arm, if it's--" She buried her face into her hands and stifled a scream. "He's in danger, Bobbi. I know he is."

Bobbi nodded tightly and scrolled through the list of Fitz's last know locations. "The Boiler Room. That's where he was last seen."

"Do you know who he was with?" Jemma asked, half of her not wanting to know the answer.

"I have an idea." Bobbi pulled off her lab coat and grabbed the batons she'd left on the edge of her own work station. "Take your lunch to go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. Still hoping to wrap this up in two chapters, but we'll see what happens.
> 
> What do you think of the plot development? Surprised? Everybody still in character? I would love to hear your feedback, so if you have the time, please leave a comment and let me know.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternating Jemma/Fitz POVs. Jemma and Bobbi investigate Switchblade, Fitz has a showdown with Ward that ends very badly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Notapepper for looking this over for me!

The bar was sadder-looking than Jemma remembered from her last trip out drinking with the crew. It had been a long time though, well before the monolith, Trip's death, her mission at HYDRA or even the pod. She hadn't really had much to celebrate since the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The smell of stale beer in the hot afternoon sun made her stomach roll, but she pushed through.

Bobbi walked through the room with purpose, slamming her hand down on the counter to get the barkeep's attention. "I'm looking for somebody, Frank."

"Bobbi." The man nodded for her to continue, though he didn't stop his task of oiling the bar.

"Fitz. The guy Hunter and I sometimes come in with. Scottish. Dark blond hair, blue eyes. Yay tall." Her hand hovered somewhere around her chin. "Have you seen him?"

Frank stopped polishing for a beat and looked up. "Sci-ops?"

She nodded, tersely.

"Last time I saw him was when he took Switchblade out into the back alley." A lascivious smile, that Jemma didn't quite understand, crawled across his face.

"He went into the alley with a switchblade?" Jemma asked, brows bunching as she pointed to the back exit. "What on Earth could Fitz possibly need with a switchblade? You don't suppose he was in some sort of fight?" Her heartbeat picked up as her brain raced through various horrible scenarios.

"Not _a_ Switchblade," Frank corrected. "Switchblade. The hot, pixie-looking chick with all the knives."

"Do you think she'd hurt him?" Jemma pressed.

Frank let out a hoarse laugh, slapping the rag onto the bar in the process. "Oh she'd hurt him all right, but I doubt he'd be complaining about it."

Jemma's fingers curled around the edge of one of the bar stools to keep her upright. "Oh."

Bobbi waved a hand in the air to break up the tension. "She took him in the alley. Know what time?"

Frank shrugged. "Had to have been after midnight at least. Most of the customers leave around then who have day jobs, only the regulars stay beyond that."

"Mind if we look around?" It might have been phrased as a question, but Bobbi didn't wait for an answer before she started off for the alley.

Jemma forced a grateful smiled for the bartender and followed her friend.

* * *

 

The back alley was lined with trash bins, but otherwise surprisingly clean. Other than a tied off condom resting on the floor near the back wall.

The evidence of Fitz's evening was lying at Bobbi's feet, prompting a disgusted grimace from the woman. "Well, he was certainly here, it seems."

Jemma was numb at the sight of it. Fitz didn't owe her anything, particularly after how they'd left things the other morning, but she'd never figured him for somebody who would be with women so casually. "It's probably not him," she said, knowing as the words came out that it was wishful thinking. "Fitz wouldn't litter."

Bobbi exploded into a laugh. "In my experience, littering hasn't been too much of a concern when having drunken alley sex."

Jemma wanted to cry, and not only because she feared for his safety. It wasn't her right to be jealous of what Fitz had done, but she couldn't help it. Regardless of how complicated things had gotten between them, how confused she was about Will, it didn't affect the way she felt about him.

She stared at the ground and tried to control her emotions. That's when she noticed the blood. "Oh. Bobbi, look." She pointed with a trembling finger to the red pool of dried blood at the edge of the back gate and braced herself against the wall for support. "I can't."

Bobbi held her hand out for Jemma to stay and walked over to investigate. "It's blood. Not enough to suggest he's suffered more than a small injury. See? The trail seems to end after a few yards. It couldn't have been a serious wound."

Jemma forced herself to leave the security of the wall and joined Bobbi to examine the stain. She dropped to her knees and pulled an empty glass container in her bag, where she scooped up as much of the blood covered dirt she could extract. "We can test this to make sure it's really his."

"God. You're like the world's nerdiest Girl Scout. Always prepared." Bobbi rested a hand on the back of Jemma's neck. "This is good news, though. It may not look like it, but it is. If they'd wanted Fitz dead, there would be a lot more blood than this." She walked a circuit around the fence perimeter and stopped to lift something small from the ground. The tracker, crushed. "See? Now we know where the blood came from. They wouldn't have had to cut too deep to get it out, so I'm sure he's fine."

"He could still get an infection," Jemma mumbled, under her breath. Her hands shook as she screwed the top of the specimens jar shit.

"Come on." Bobbi jerked her head toward the back gate as she checked her phone. "Daisy just sent over Switchblade's home address. I think we should pay her a visit."

Jemma stood, her legs weak from nerves, and shook her head. "I should get this back to the lab."

"We know it's his. This is his tracker." Bobbi pressed the tracker into her hand with a sympathetic look. "You don't have to talk to her, but she's the last one who saw him, so somebody does."

"Right. Of course." Jemma shoved the tracker and the jar into her bag and took a deep breath. "Let's go find this Switchblade."

* * *

  
It hadn't even been 24 hours and Fitz could tell that time was already running short for him. They'd sent somebody every hour on the hour to wake him up, to demand answers and information, but he'd only given them the bare minimum. He told them just enough to keep them from going after Jemma - like, how to activate their tiny monolith - but not enough to buy himself some space.

They expected Fitz to be able to recreate the wormhole without his own research or equipment, as if every condition everywhere were the same and he had the data completely memorized. The one thing he did know offhand was the correct frequency of the vibrations required to open the portal, but without Daisy there to help, it was like trying to drive a horseless carriage. And he'd already decided never to tell them about the moving portal, for fear of the danger they might export to other areas of the Galaxy. Hydra was a cancer that had to be stopped at the source. 

They were fast losing the little patience they had to begin with, and it definitely didn't help that Fitz was hungry and weary from lack of sleep. He knew the human body was capable of living without water for three days, possibly more, if he didn't exert himself too much. But, he was pretty certain he'd be exerting himself once they started in with the physical stuff. And he'd finished the glass of water they'd given him 12 hours ago.

He wondered where he was, or if anybody from the ATCU was even looking for him. Lincoln would, of course, but he was still just a medical doctor. He didn't have the skills or knowledge to find somebody kidnapped by a top spy.

Plus, there was the matter of the militia men guarding each entrance with semi-automatic weapons. Three monitors lined the wall of the outer room, displaying each door and the consequences various unauthorized trespassers had faced while trying to pass through. To say they were unsuccessful was an understatement.

"You're stalling." Ward entered the room without preamble, making a straight line for Fitz's cell. "Malick wants me to rough you up."

Fitz's stomach dropped at the implication. He was expecting it at some point, but hadn't thought they'd get to the torture phase for another few days. He took a fortifying breath and steeled himself for the worst. "I figured he would eventually."

"Or you could just tell us what we want to know?" Ward circled the glass box, letting the butt of his gun scrape along the surface of it as he went. "We're going to get it out of you one way or another."

He crossed his arms over his chest, protectively. "Then you'd best get to it, I suppose."

Ward paused for a moment, a look of utter bewilderment on his face. "I can't believe you're willing to endure what I've got in store for you just to protect S.H.I.E.L.D."

"I took an oath." Fitz leaned forward and arched a brow at him. "That means something to some people."

"But why? Why S.H.I.E.L.D.?" he asked, scratching the side of his face with the butt of his gun. "What couldn't you have accomplished working in the the private sector - for Pym or Stark - that you needed S.H.I.E.L.D. for? What have they actually ever done for you?"

"Well, I know what they haven't done, and that's throw me to the bottom of the ocean inside of a med pod. They've got that going for them."

Ward spun the barrel of his gun like a roulette wheel, each click of it giving Fitz a start. "I had my orders."

A bitter laugh erupted from Fitz's throat. "So did Klaus Barbie, but you don't - you don't see anybody bloody defending him."

With a childlike sulk, Ward leaned against the glass. "Are you still going on about the Nazi thing? That's how we were founded. It isn't who we are now."

Fitz jumped to his feet and crossed to where Ward was standing to face him. "Yeah? And who are you? Because I'd really love to know the answer to that."

"HYDRA was a means to an end. Still is. One giant organization is just as corrupt or benevolent as the next. You're just picking your poison. If you think S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't made some equally shady decisions, you're fooling yourself."

"Okay, pretending that's true for a moment, what are you even fighting for, then? What's the point of anything you do anymore? Garrett's gone," Fitz said, gesturing wildly at nothing. "Why choose loyalty to Malick over Coulson?"

Ward leaned in, pressing the top of his forehead against the glass, like he was sharing a confidence. "Coulson doesn't want my loyalty. Not anymore."

Fitz took a step closer, mirroring the action. "What do _you_ want? Think back - back to the happiest time in your life - and ask yourself how you let it all slip through your fingers."

Ward pushed himself off the glass, clenching his jaw. "I fucked up. Okay?" He threw his arms in the air as he walked away, then stopped on dime and turned around. "That what you want to hear? I had a good thing going and I fucked it up for a guy who never gave a shit about me. Feel better now?"

"Do you?"

Ward shook his head and circled back around, pointing his finger at Fitz through the glass. "I didn't come here to have a conversation with you. I came here to get results."

Fitz shrugged and sunk back down onto the mattress. "Sorry to disappoint you, then."

An emotionless look crossed Ward's face, colder than the Arctic. "You're not going to disappoint me. I'm quite sure of that."

"I can't give you what I don't have." Fitz stretched his hands out, palms open, as if to prove he had nothing to give.

"You brought Simmons back from that planet - something that nobody else in the history of the world has been able to do - and we want to know how."

A swell of longing - of missing Jemma - pressed against his chest and he smiled. "I had motivation."

Ward echoed the smile, darkly. "I can give you motivation."

"The incentives program?" Fitz rolled his eyes. "God, you're such a twat."

"If I have to put Simmons on that planet just to get you to bring her back again, I'll do it." He let his fingers run down the invisible seam of the cage door. "Just remember what Garrett was willing to do to get Coulson's secret."

Fitz jerked back, the memory of Daisy bleeding out onto the floor of Quinn's mansion flashing through his mind. "You're quite the little protégée, aren't you?

"I'm a quick study," he said, low voice brimming with promise. "And that should frighten you."

"You still haven't said why you're doing this. Why HYDRA?"

Ward looked around him, gesturing with the gun. "Here is as good as anywhere. Every soldier needs a grand cause to fight for."

"And your grand cause is HYDRA?" Fitz tipped his head back and forced a laugh.

A slick smile played on Grant Ward's lips. "And yours is one woman. What would you do if I killed her, Fitz? Who would your life revolve around then?"

Fear and anger surged through his body, pushing him back onto his feet. "You kill her and you'll never get what you want from me. You'll have no l-leverage."

Ward thought about it for a moment and nodded. "True. That's why I'm not going to bother with threatening her anymore. I'm going to threaten you, instead."

"I already told you I don't care what you do to me."

"As you so helpfully pointed out on several occassions." He quickly tapped the code into the door panel and wrenched it open. "That's why I'm going to use you to get to her, this time."

Fitz tried to school the panic from his face. "She was on the side of the portal that couldn't open, remember? She doesn't know anything."

"Right, because you two never talk. I'm getting that information from one of you, no matter what I have to do to the other." After taking a few steps inside, Ward raised his gun and aimed it at Fitz's chest, using his other hand to keep it steady. "Last chance, Fitz."

This was it, the moment Fitz had feared since the day he and Simmons stepped on the bus a few short years ago. He always knew it was a possibility, but he never thought it would end like this, with him sitting in an abandoned warehouse, a former friend on the other side of the gun.

He didn't want to die, but he wasn't lying when he said he was prepared to do it. And he supposed it didn't really matter how it happened. Dead was dead, and at least Simmons would be safe once he was gone. Coulson would see to that. "Do it."

Surprise crossed Ward's features, but he kept the gun level. "I just want you to know that you were right, Fitz. You are every bit the agent I am."

He lowered the gun a few inches and pulled the trigger with a muffled pop, sending a slug of lead burning hot into Fitz's abdomen.

Fitz stared at his wound in disbelief, crimson blood welling through his fingers. He shock prevented him from feeling the initial burst of pain, but when it finally hit him, it was like a thousand tiny daggers slicing through his torso. "Why?"

What was the point of shooting Fitz in the stomach, rather than in the head, where it would kill him instantly? Why keep him alive at this point, when Ward knew he could get nothing more from him?

Ward lowered the gun, letting his arm dangle by his side. "You might not give a shit about yourself, Fitz, but Simmons does. And I'm willing to bet her loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't worth more than your life, even if yours is."

With that, Ward left the room.

The pain of disappointment ached more deeply than the wound that was bleeding out. Fitz hadn't been able to keep Jemma safe, after all, and she'd no doubt feel responsible for what happened to him. His aim was for them to kill him and give up, find another avenue of information to pursue. But, his risky tactic had backfired and now doomed them both.

Using the last bit of strength he could muster, Fitz stripped the sheet of his bed and wrapped it around his middle, pulling it taut with an agonizing yank. It wouldn't staunch his bleeding, but it would slow it down.

Fitz then fell onto the bare mattress and wrapped the blanket he was given around his shoulders and head, to prevent loss of warmth. He wasn't sure why he was bothering to try to keep himself alive, bait was much less appealing when it was dead.

He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the things he loved in life. Robotics, his lab, monkeys, and her. Always her. Her eyes were bright in his mind, nose wrinkling at something funny he'd once said, and he tried his best to remember her laugh as the shaking began.

 

* * *

 

Jemma's steps were increasingly sluggish as she and Bobbi approached the front door of Sam's apartment building.

The nickname Switchblade evoked a lot of unpleasant thoughts, but Jemma wasn't frightened about the possibility of something bad happening to her. What she was really scared of is what she would do to Switchblade, if it turned out the woman was indeed complicit in whatever happened to Fitz. Switchblade may have been a trained assassin, but she was still human and Jemma was a genius.

If Sam hurt Fitz at all, Jemma would find a way to make her pay in ways she'd never even imagined were possible.

Bobbi's eyes narrowed at Jemma, as if she we're sizing her up. "You're staying here."

"What? No!" It came out like a whine, which would've been embarrassing in any other situation.

"Yes. You've got berserker rage in your eyes right now, and that's not going to do anything but scare her off."

Jemma's back straightened, her fingers slipping inside of her bag to finger the Icer she always kept on her now. "Maybe I want her to be scared?"

Bobbi gave her a sidelong glance. "You want answers or revenge?"

She removed her hand from her bag with a resigned sigh. "Answers."

"Stay here. Trust me to do this." Bobbi took Jemma's phone and brought up her own number on it. "Keep your phone handy in case we need to contact each other."

Bobbi squeezed Jemma's shoulder and entered the lobby of the building.

The moment the door closed, Jemma felt a tingling sensation on the back of her neck again, the same as when she was in the park. Her finger hovered over the call button on her phone, but she was hesitant to press it. Jemma didn't want to derail Bobbi from her task over her own silly paranoia.

She turned in a circle to survey the area, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Still. Bobbi had told her to trust her instincts.

The moment Jemma hit the call button on her phone, a figure jumped out at her from the bushes at the crosswalk.

A flash of blue skin was all Jemma needed to see before she turned and ran for the street.

Jemma wasn't a strong runner, not compared to whatever was chasing her, but she wouldn't go down without causing some damage herself. She fell on the ground and pulled the Icer from her bag - having just enough time to aim the gun and shoot - pressing the trigger twice and hitting her pursuer squarely in the chest both times.

The woman with the blue skin stumbled backward a few feet, brushed the neurotoxin residue from her shirt as an afterthought and kept walking toward Jemma, a smirk on her face. "The Night-Night Gun?"

At the use of Fitz's old nickname for the weapon, Jemma's eyes widened in realization. "Switchblade?"

Sam smiled and climbed on top of Jemma's body, straddling her waist and pinning her arms over her head. She looked down on Jemma, unimpressed. "Let me guess, you're the girl? I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this."

"What girl?" Jemma's chest rose and fell rapidly as she tried to wiggle free.

"You broke his heart, you know. I should probably kill you just for that." Sam's blue skin shimmered purple under the pink light of the sunset.

"Probably." Jemma gasped for air as Sam squeezed her thighs harder around her ribcage. "And you can, but please just - don't hurt him."

Sam's angry expression softened into something ambiguous. "God, you actually love him back, don't you?"

Jemma nodded her head furiously. "Please. Anything. Just let him go."

"I can't do that," she said, looking vaguely conflicted about it. "He needs medical help and I've been told you're some kind of doctor."

A panic raced through Jemma's veins like ice water, sending her into a shiver. "What did you do to him? Is he--"

"He's alive. For now." Sam bit her bottom lip and brushed Jemma's hair out of her face for a better view. "Are you going to come willingly or do I have to kiss you?"

That's when it dawned on Jemma, the neurotoxin in the Icer didn't work on Sam, because she _was_ a neurotoxin.

"You'll take me to Fitz?" Hope dawned on her face.

Sam sighed. "He's a good guy. A fantastic lay. And if he weren't so hung up on you, he wouldn't be bleeding out on a dirty fold-out cot in the middle of a HYDRA stronghold."

Jemma couldn't stop the sob from escaping her lungs. "He's bleeding out? What did you do to him?"

"Me? I didn't do that." Sam released Jemma's arms and stood over her body with an outstretched hand, that was quickly fading back into a human shade of pink. "Are you coming or what?"

"Of course I am." Jemma reached up and took the woman's hand.

* * *

After 40 minutes of driving with a blindfold on, the town car finally rolled to a stop, tires crunching over the last few feet of gravel like bones under a conquering army's boots. Jemma's spirit was buoyed knowing they hadn't taken her far, that she and Fitz would be conceivably within S.H.I.E.L.D.'s reach, if their friends could only find them.

She'd been relieved of her mobile phone and tracker on the way over. Knowing she wouldn't run because of Fitz's urgent situation, Sam had enough trust to allow Jemma to cut it from her arm herself.

The motor had barely shuddered off when the side door opened and two men roughly pulled her from the car by her arms.

"Where's Leo Fitz?" She was met with silence, but they continued marching her toward the door at the end of a long, empty hallway.

One guard turned his back to block the lock pad from view and tapped out a five digit code, prompting a loud clicking sound from the door.

As soon as the door was open, they pushed her inside and closed the door behind her, another loud click telling her it had been locked.

She walked slowly toward the enclosure in the center of the room, feeling a lot like Alice falling through the looking glass.

As she reached the open door of the cage, she noticed Fitz lying on the bed, passed out in a worryingly large puddle of his own blood. Her knees almost gave out under her at the sight of him, pale and motionless. "Oh my God. Fitz!"

Jemma rushed into the jail cell, a tray of surgical instruments and blood bags immediately catching her eye. Whoever wanted her here, knew exactly what she was, and exactly who she was to Fitz. Otherwise, they could've brought in any doctor to help him.

She kneeled at his bedside and pulled the sodden blankets from his body to check the damage.

A bullet wound to the abdomen. Somebody wanted this to be slow. She knew it was a trap to get her here, but she wasn't exactly sure why. They could've just kidnapped her as they had done to him, it's not exactly like she had the skills to fight them off. Why put Fitz in this state just to get her to come?

That's when it dawned on her. They wanted something from her, and he was the leverage. Or more likely, they were each other's leverage. For what, she didn't know.

"Fitz?" She tried to rouse him without moving him too much, but he was unresponsive.

She swallowed down the fear clawing at her chest and set immediately to work, ripping his shirt from his body to expose the level of damage he'd received. The wound was clean, a small caliber bullet lodged somewhere in his liver - high enough away from his bowels not to perforate them and cause sepsis. Whomever made the shot had known what they were doing.

Grabbing one of the bags of blood, she set up an IV line next to the wound on his left arm, then turned to check out the instrument set she'd been given.

Everything but a scalpel.

What the fuck were they playing at? Why bring her here just to make her watch him die?

A knock on the side of the glass drew her attention.

On the other side of the door stood Grant Ward, holding a sterile surgical tray in one hand as he waved playfully to her with the other. "Looking for these?"

 _Of course_. Grant Ward. She wondered why it hadn't occurred to her earlier.

Jemma jumped to her feet and circled around to face him head-on. "Give me the tray, Grant. Now!"

"Uh-uh, not so fast." He held it higher than her grasp. "Quid pro quo, Simmons. Quid pro quo."

She let out a frustrated groan and fisted her hands at her sides. He knew as well as she did that the instruments would be contaminated if they fell to the ground. "He's lying there dying because of you! Again! What could possibly be important enough to greviously injure him like this again?"

"The monolith."

Her head rolled back with a sigh. Of course they'd want that. HYDRA had been trying to get their hands on it since before she'd even joined S.H.I.E.L.D. "There is no monolith anymore. It's just a pile of rubble now."

Ward looked genuinely taken off-guard by that information. "If that is true, why didn't he just tell me that?"

"I suspect he was being noble and loyal." Her face broke out into a pained smile at the thought of Fitz's strong will. "Please Grant. Please give me the tray. If you ever cared about him at all, you'll let me fix him."

He looked over her shoulder at Fitz's body and clenched his jaw. "How loyal _are_ you to S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"I'm loyal to _him_. Everything else is negotiable." Jemma even shocked herself with what she'd just said, mainly because she realized that deep down it was the truth. Fitz was her only concern before she'd joined S.H.I.E.L.D. and he would be her concern long after the organization fell. Everything else was just background noise.

A smug expression appeared, which she fully anticipated. "I'm not surprised you were the first one to crack. Your moral compass always was a pretty deep shade of grey."

She couldn't argue with that. "Tell me what you want."

"Give us one detail about the monolith and the portal, something that gets us closer to our goal," Ward lowered the tray and held it out to her, "and this yours."

Jemma's eyes drifted toward Fitz -who was just beginning to stir - then quickly flicked back to Grant. "On the North 39th Parallel, you'll find a movable portal."

The guilt she felt from selling Ward that information made her want to wretch, but there was no other choice. She'd essentially put Will at risk in order to save Fitz, but at this moment, all she could worry about was saving her best friend's life.

Ward nodded and released the tray carefully into her grip. "I'll be back."

"I know." She felt the precious weight of the tools settle in her hands and walked them into her makeshift operating theater.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Working my ass off to get this finished before the next episode, where everything I've written will turn out to be super off-base. Maybe one more chapter and an epilogue? Possibly?
> 
> Do you like it? If you've got the time, please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The shit hits the fan. Basically.  
> Alternating Fitz/Jemma POVs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a few issues with the last chapter - when I reread it, I realized Ward's motive for shooting Fitz wasn't exactly clear - so I tweaked it. You may want to reread that section of the chapter before reading this one.
> 
> Clearly, I'm not going to finish this entire fic before the episode tonight, but here's another chapter!
> 
> Many thanks to notapepper for giving this a once over and for being generally awesome.

The first thing Fitz noticed when he opened his eyes was the saline drip hanging above him and the silicone tubing which ended at the fold of his elbow. Based on the the floaty, dissociative state his mind was in, the bag no doubt also contained a generous helping of opiates.

He wasn't sure exactly how he ended up in this condition or where he was, but it had to have been bad for him to be laid out like this.

The next thing he noticed was the heavy weight molded against his side, heating him like a furnace. He recognized the scent of Jemma's hair immediately and hoped it wasn't just wishful thinking on his part.

With a slight shift of his shoulders, he caught a glimpse of her. Jemma's eyes were puffy and red, cheeks tear-stained and pale, like she'd been crying. It was the worst kind of deja vu. 

The sight of her so distraught make his chest constrict, and for a moment he wondered if he'd only dreamt the past year - his hypoxia, her disappearance, Will the handsome astronaut - if maybe he'd been in a coma the entire time? He would've done anything for that to have been true.

Not sure if his tongue could form words yet, he gave it a try. "J-Jemma?"

"Fitz?" Jemma woke immediately, as if only on the edge of sleep. She quickly propped herself on her elbow to face him, tears of relief welling in her eyes. "Oh thank god. How do you feel?"

Her fingers pressed into his cheek, slightly painfully, as if making sure he was real.

"What - where am I?" He tired to sit up but a firm hand to the chest kept him flat.

"Stop that," she said, mouth pursing into a frown. "You'll pop your stitches if you do that."

"My what?" The painkillers in his IV wrapped the world around him in downy cotton. "What--?"

"You were shot, Fitz." Her eyes pinched shut as she collected her thoughts.

Images of blue skin and sleepy kisses, glass walls and Grant Ward bombarded him like a psychic echo.

"Ward," he rasped out, his tone distracted as he worked to keep his eyes focused.

Her fingers climbed higher on his face, teasing the wavy fringe of his hairline. "I know."

"What are you even doing here?" His memories returned to him fast and furious, crushing disappointment of failure nearly pushing the air from his lungs. "They threatened your life?"

"They said you were hurt, I went willingly."

"Jem, you shouldn't be here. They want to know how to get to your planet."

She leaned in closer. "Ward said you wouldn't help them."

Nothing Fitz had done protected Simmons from this, and nothing he could do now would save her. Laid out on a hospital bed like an overturned turtle, he'd never felt more helpless. "I told them how to activate their small version of the monolith, but they couldn't make it function. It's not my fault they're too stupid to work it out on their own. Maybe it was too small or they couldn't replicate the correct frequency? I -I don't know. They thought I was holding out on them."

Jemma narrowed her eyes at him in a way that dared him to trifle with her. "Were you?"

He looked pointedly at the security cameras, then back at her and mouthed. _Of course I was._

She grabbed a handful of her own hair in frustration and fell back next to him on the bed. "Why?! Why would you possibly keep that information to yourself when your life was at stake?"

Whatever fears he had of them figuring out his gambit were now blown.

"You'd never get Will home if I had!" If she wasn't going to be discreet, there was no point for Fitz to either. "Besides, who knows what hell HYDRA is planning on releasing on that planet?"

Jemma's voice was husky and strained. "Whatever it is, it could only be an improvement."

He shook his head. "You don't know that. It was too risky to chance."

"You don't take chances with your life, Fitz." She pushed back up onto her elbow to look at his face. Being immobile, he had no choice but to withstand her uncomfortable scrutiny. Her expression was so tangled with different emotions, that she seemed to have trouble speaking right away. "Oh God. You provoked him into shooting you, didn't you? You wanted this?"

Fitz stared past her to the industrial ceiling of the warehouse. It was easier to speak when he didn't have to look her in the eyes. "I figured they might stop pursuing you as leverage once their source of possible information dried up."

Her face hardened. "Dried up? That's the worst euphemism I've ever heard for murder."

A bitter laughed tumbled out. "Does my word choice really matter?"

"He nearly killed you." Her eyes darkened, pinning him with a look. "Yes, it bloody matters."

"Why are you even here?" he said, changing track by going on the offensive. "You should have stayed back at the base."

"You were shot." Jemma scowled at him like he'd just insulted her mother. "They came to fetch me. What else was I supposed to do?"

He turned his head and snapped. "Stay home."

She scoffed at the suggestion. "You'd be dead if I had."

Fitz rested the back of his hand over his eyes to block out the look of protest he knew was coming. "Yeah, but you'd be safe."

"What's the point of being safe if I have to spend the rest of my life without you? You've saved me endless times already, how could I not have repaid that? Did you honestly think I wouldn't have come?"

He let his hand drop away, but still couldn't bring himself to look at her. "I don't expect you to 'pay me back' for the times I've saved you, Jemma. Those were my choices. You have so much to give the world - far more than I'd ever be able to - and my death would only leave my mum behind, whereas yours--"

"You'd be leaving _me_ behind!" She let out a strangled groan as she clutched at the remaining tatters of his shirt, lips quivering with rage. "Also, none of the amazing things I've supposedly accomplished would have been at all possible without you by my side. I'm so angry with you right now. If you weren't already laid up, I'd put you in hospital, myself."

"I'm sorry." None of this was done to hurt her, but Fitz could see now that that's what he'd done. He reached for her hand. "I'm sorry, okay?"

"Just don't." She pulled her hand away, holding it to her chest like it had been injured. "I-I can't imagine any version of my life that doesn't have you in it. You're my best friend, my partner, my...we're like...a shared pair. Like two electrons with a covalent bond. How do you separate something that's become part of you on a molecular level?"

Fitz was floored by her admission. She'd managed to encapsulate in a few words what he'd spent the last few years trying to say. If the Earth burned and there was nothing left standing, his feelings for her would remain, etched into the fabric of the universe as solid and indestructible as matter.

Without thinking, he lunged up to kiss her but a sharp tug at his gut sent him falling back onto the mattress. "Fuck."

Her expression broke and she smiled indulgently at his frustration. She bracketed his head with her arms, careful to avoid playing any pressure on his wound. "Might be a little early for that."

Fitz's chest rose and fell, his quickening breath sending the alarm on his heart monitor into overdrive. "No. It's about 12 years too late. I'm sorry. I shouldn't -- I know you're confused, but you - you can't just say things like that to me and not expect--"

"Who said I wasn't expecting?" Jemma swayed forward, like she was about to kiss him, but pulled herself back. "And I am confused. More than ever now, after what I've done."

"What did you do?" He pulled back to look at her face, wary of the spark of guilt evident behind her eyes.

She bit her lip and whispered, "I gave Ward the coordinates to the portal."

"Jemma, no!" He tried to sit up again, but a palm to the center of his chest held him still.

Her face was lined from exhaustion, and more than just the physical kind. The last time Fitz had seen her looking this rough was the day after he'd pulled her through the portal. "I had to. Ward wouldn't have given me the scalpel if I hadn't."

"They could get to Will before we do, you know. You've put him in danger."

Jemma nodded with a resigned shrug of her shoulders, hand still warming the skin over his heart. "I know. But I didn't have a choice."

He brought his hand to cover hers. "There was another choice. And as much as I don't want to die, I still do wish you'd taken it."

"You should know me well enough to know I wouldn't do that. Couldn't."

"Aye." He brought the back of her hand to his cheek. "I know."

Jemma's eyes softened at the affectionate gesture and she opened her mouth to speak. "Leo, I --"

"The deal was you discussing physics with him, Simmons, not chemistry." The electronic lock clicked into place behind Ward, as he continued walking toward them, a genuine expression of amusement written across his face.

Fitz and Simmons instinctively pulled apart like teenagers caught by their parents.

"Seriously, though, well done on finally working your shit out. Took you only..." Ward glanced at his watch, "...three years? Let's hope you can stay alive long enough to reach that stage where you start to fantasize about other people in bed."

The muscles in Jemma's neck tensed. "You have what you want. There's no reason to keep us here. Especially not Fitz, he needs a proper doctor."

Ward cupped his hands around his eyes as he peered at them through the glass. "He looks alive from where I'm standing. Was something missing from the med kit?"

"I'm fine," Fitz spat, growing more irritable by the moment. The opiates might have taken care of the pain from his physical injuries, but some wounds would always run deeper than that. "Don't pretend you give a shit."

"I do give a shit." Ward sounded and appeared deadly serious. "It's not like I ever wanted you dead. I didn't before and I don't now. I was glad to hear you'd both made it out alive."

"Barely," Jemma sniffed, crossing her arms over her chest.

Fitz hissed in agony as he struggled to sit up. "If you don't really want to hurt us, Ward, then prove it. Let Simmons go."

 

* * *

 

Something in the first security monitor above Ward's head caught Jemma's eye. A beautiful redhead wearing yoga pants, a skin-tight tank top and a wanton smile approached one of the guards, the physical embodiment of temptation.

Jemma covertly reached for Fitz's hand to alert him, but he was too distracted by Ward's approach to be swayed.

"You don't need her here for this, Ward." Fitz's clenched his teeth together, breathing turning more ragged from the pressure of sitting upright.

Jemma wondered briefly if Ward had given them enough opiates for Fitz to make it through the next few days.

Ward blinked at Fitz, almost bored by the other man's plea. "But I do. You were holding back on me, old buddy. Maybe with her here now, you'll be more forthcoming?"

"You could have brought her here without shooting me." Fitz gestured to his bandaged stomach.

"Sure, but now she actively wants this. I doubt we'd even need to lock her up to get her to stay. She wants this portal open as badly as we do now, don't you, Simmons?"

Grant's eyes fell on her, pulling her attention from the monitors for a moment. "Yes."

"We didn't even have to threaten her directly, Fitz. All we had to do was threaten you. Now that she's here though...I have a feeling you'll be extra motivated to get the job done. You always did work better as a team."

In the last of the three monitors, another redhead approached the guard at that entrance, dressed in the same distracting clothes, and started to flirt.

Jemma blinked her eyes, wondering for a second if she was seeing things.

Fitz's body was a tense line beside her. "Maybe if you finally told me what you needed the portal open for, I'd be more amenable to helping you, myself?"

"That's a need-to-know." Ward's head tipped to the side, as if weighing his options, then shrugged. "Oh, what the hell? It's not like you're going anywhere soon, right? The whole idea is - frankly speaking - kind of batshit, but when Malick gets an idea in his head...anyway, there's a guy on the planet that he wants to bring back to Earth."

That statement caught Jemma's attention. "Who?"

"A very powerful, ancient inhuman. Exiled to that planet centuries ago. HYDRA - or the secret organization that eventually turned into HYDRA - has been trying to rescue him since." Grant cringed a little as he finished his explanation. "And yes, I realize how insane this sounds."

Fitz's eyes grew large. "Jem, that strange symbol on Will's jacket. The shape isn't exactly the same, but if you flip it upside down, it looks awfully similar to--"

"--an octopus! I noticed it was the same symbol that was carved into the walls of that castle in Gloucester, but I never tied it to -- are you saying you think that cult in England was some kind of proto-HYDRA group?"

"Could be? Malick would know for sure." Fitz's gaze drifted toward Ward, who remained tight-lipped.

Jemma's head was spinning at the implications from this discovery, but she wasn't ready to follow the path it was leading her down. "We don't know that this means anything, Fitz. It doesn't necessarily mean--"

"--that Will is HYDRA?" Fitz's mouth closed quickly, his Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed audibly. There was no doubt in her mind he had a lot to say and was holding it back for her benefit. "Yeah, he could have been just another victim like you...but maybe not."

Jemma was thinking the same thing before he'd said it, but it didn't make the words any easier to hear. "He was there for 14 years, Fitz. Will couldn't have known there was no way home when he volunteered for the mission. Who would ever willingly sign up for that? He had to have been tricked."

"Yes, but why?" he snapped back, in that testy tone he often used with some of their lab techs when they messed up. "What would have been the point of sending him there? There's obviously something that we're missing." His lips pursed together tightly.

Ward raised an index finger. "Not to break up your 'sciencing', but who the hell is Will?"

Jemma blushed and turned away from both men. "He was on the planet when I got there."

"For 14 years?" The skeptical edge to Ward's voice cut her to the bone. Even he could tell what a fantastical tale it was and he'd only heard the surface details.

How had she been so blind? It never even occurred to her once to question it. Why? "That's what he said. He was an astronaut. There was never any indication he was anything other than he said."

"Except for when he put you in that cage," Fitz mumbled to himself, under his breath.

Ward let out a laugh. "He put you in a cage? Kinky."

Fitz's comment took Jemma by surprise. "How did you know about that? Bobbi?"

"As enjoyable as this _isn't_ ," Ward tapped the butt of the gun on the side of the glass wall. "Maybe, put your little lovers' quarrel on ice for a minute? I'm going to need a few more details. Are you telling me that there were other people on the planet with you? We were led to believe it was uninhabited, other than the man in question Malick is trying to bring back."

"I only ever saw one person," she said, touching the side of her head to stave off the migraine that had come up suddenly.

Ward's brow raised, his interest peaked. "See anything other than a person? If the guy is inhuman, he could've taken practically any form."

Her forehead wrinkled in thought. "There was one thing - a horrifying apparition cloaked in worn black garments who always seemed to appear just as a sand storm began to kick up - though I couldn't really say exactly what or who I was looking at."

Fitz's grasp on her hand tightened uncomfortably, his face pale with fear. "Was that - you said - the thing that was hunting you?"

Her head was hot with pain, but she nodded anyway. "Every time I tried to leave the bunker to go into the dead zone. I never made it more than half a mile before the wind started to blow. Will warned me not to go, but I didn't always listen."

"Of course you didn't," Fitz said, almost fondly.

Ward started to chuckle, gloating as though he'd figured out something she hadn't. "You're telling me that some random guy stranded on what you described to be an otherwise desolate planet - the only person you saw the entire six months you were there - survived for 14 years on his own and it didn't set off any alarm bells for you? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius."

The niggling voice in the back of her mind that she'd been able to silence all these months finally made itself heard. Will couldn't possibly have been everything he'd said he was. At best, he was a HYDRA pawn, possibly used to entrap her, and at worst, he was the great inhuman himself.

Her hands began to shake as the reality of the situation sank in. "No. No. I know who Will is, Ward, and he's not some inhuman monster!"

"Of course not." Fitz blinked his eyes hard to shake off the glassy-eyed haze from the drugs. Jemma wrapped one of his arms around her own waist to support him. "And even if - I'm sure whatever he is or was, it wasn't by choice," he said, allowing her to take some of his weight. "You were traumatized and lonely. You believed what you needed to believe to survive. But he's probably just as much a victim as you were."

"Well, even if he is, we still can't open that portal. HYDRA wants us to do it, which automatically means it's a terrible idea." Jemma could see her own devastation reflected in Fitz's eyes, and not for the first time, she marveled at his almost bottomless capacity for empathy where she was concerned.

"We can't leave him, Jemma. If he is trapped with some evil inhuman or under its control, he needs our help more than ever."

"No one man's life is worth the lives of who-knows-how-many?" She shook her head. "No. It's settled."

"It's fucking not." Fitz exhaled harshly through his nose as he always did when he was trying not to lose his temper. "You've said yourself what a hellscape that place was. We can't just - just leave him there to rot. How could you just--"

"You think I don't want to rescue him? You know what Will means to me, Fitz! I slept with him!" she said, aloud, in too much of a state to filter her thoughts. "I _loved_ him."

"Ouch." Ward's eyes flitted between Jemma and Fitz, an unreadable expression on his face. "That's going to be a tough one to get past, huh? Being thrown over for an evil inhuman shapeshifter?"

Fitz rage began to percolate again, his anger nearly palpable. "We don't know that for sure."

"You're right. I'm sure everything was on the up and up." Ward's sarcasm visibly drove Fitz closer to the edge.

Fitz opened his mouth to respond, but then suddenly decided against it.

Jemma could sense the moment Fitz's glare shifted from Ward to the line of monitors on the back wall.

There were three women there now, all dressed exactly the same, flirting with the guards at all three exits.

 _Alicia_.

Daisy's Secret Warriors had finally come for them. Jemma had to keep Ward distracted until Daisy could find them a way inside.

"Did you find the portal from the coordinates I gave you?" she asked, her words pulling Fitz's focus back from the monitors.

Ward raised an eyebrow at the awkward segue. "Still trying to establish a pattern, but yes."

"So you won't need us much longer then?" She already knew what the answer would be, but she had to try.

"A little longer. After all, we're going to need a tour guide, somebody who knows the lay of the land. Can't exactly call up AAA for directions, can we?"

Jemma's face collapsed at the mere possibility of returning to the planet, her breath beginning to quicken. Of course, she'd been mentally preparing herself for a return visit over the past few months, but the idea that her journey was imminent made her blood run cold.

Fitz grip around her waist tightened painfully, drawing a gasp from her. "I'll go."

Ward smiled warmly at him. "You can barely stand. Plus, we need somebody who's actually been there longer than a few minutes."

The sound of an alarm going off brought their conversation to a halt. Ward drew his gun again as he spun around to check the security monitors.

Two of the three guards had already been incapacitated. They were just in time to see the third succumb to a roundhouse kick to the throat. As the man fell to the ground, Alicia placed a finger to one ear and mouthed something into the comms.

"Amateurs." Ward grumbled, taking the safety off his gun.

At that moment, the ground beneath them started to shake.

A momentary flash of worry appeared behind Ward's eyes. "Skye's here?"

"She goes by Daisy now." Jemma wasn't sure why she was bothering to correct him.

"And she brought friends," Fitz added, a now-rare smile tugging at the sides of his lips.

Ward looked like he had just eaten a bad nut. "Daisy? Really? She doesn't look like a _Daisy_."

"That's what I said," Fitz piped in, prompting a light pinch on the arm from Simmons.

Despite his dire predicament, Ward appeared strangely unbothered by it all.

The glass walls of Fitz and Jemma's enclosure started to rumble precariously, swaying in their foundation.

"Get under the blanket! Now!" Fitz pressed the blanket into Jemma's hands and she threw it over both of their heads, just in time to protect them from the hail of glass that rained down on them as the walls exploded.

Ward stumbled backward, turning at the last second to throw an arm thrown over his eyes for safety.

As soon as the glass cleared, he strode puposely over to the bed where Fitz and Simmons sat, pulled the blanket off of their heads and jerked his chin toward the door to signal where they should move. "Time to go."

Jemma ignored him in lieu of checking Fitz for any further injuries. "Are you hurt?"

Fitz shook his head, lifting his thumb and index finger to pluck a small shard of glass from her temple. He brushed the trickle of blood away with what was left of his sleeve. "You are, though."

She leaned into his hand for comfort, wanting nothing more than to wrap them both up again in a protective barrier. "It's just a scratch."

A loud crackle of electricity surged through the building, killing all of the lights and monitors. Not moments later, the generator kicked in with a loud hum, bringing on all of the emergency ghost lights in the room.

"Lincoln," Fitz whispered his friend's name like a prayer. "He's come for us."

The outer door to the room began to melt like one of Dali's clocks and Jemma grabbed for Fitz's hand, clutching it to her chest in fear.

The door fell away completely, revealing Joey - hands outstretched - with Mack standing protectively beside him, holding a giant shotgun with an Axe strapped to the end like a bayonette.

Mack's eyes immediately fell to Fitz, taking in his friend's injured state. "Turbo? Are you hurt?"

Ward - gun still trained on the new guests - turned back to look at Fitz over his shoulder. "Turbo? Seriously? That makes you sound like a cartoon robot."

"Better than sounding like a total prick." Fitz shot back at him.

The gun in Ward's hand began to slip through his fingers like sand, falling to the floor in a puddle of liquid metal. At the improbable sight, Ward's forehead kissed his hairline. "Nice ability, man."

Joey made a fist, curling the metal into the world's most ominous-looking tennis ball. "It doesn't suck."

"I've got some special abilities myself, actually." Ward cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders as if preparing to unleash something big.

"I don't have special abilities, but I've got a big goddamn gun." Mack took a step forward, cocking the shotgun as he walked. He'd barely bridged the distance when a hot chain of fire shot out from the center of Ward's palm, wrapping itself around Mack's arm and pulling him to the floor with a sickening thud. Mack screamed and the gun clattered to the ground beside him.

"Shit!" Joey yelled over Mack's cries of agony, and with a swipe of his hand, sent the metal ball careening into Ward's fist, breaking the chain of flames.

"What the fuck did we just witness, Simmons?" Fitz's chin dropped practically to his chest.

"I think - I think the birth of another inhuman, Fitz. Shit. Shit! Of all the people..." Jemma grabbed Fitz around the waist and tugged him off the mattress with a reserve of strength she didn't realize she'd had. "We need to run."

"You run." Fitz's big eyes pleaded with her to listen, his feet remained planted in place. "I'm only gonna slow you down and you know it. You run, and - and - and I'll wait for you to get help."

"No!" Jemma hissed, trying to forcibly move him toward the door without success. "I'm not leaving you here. You can just forget it!"

"Please run. You have to." His fingers found the side of her face, thumb pressing insistently into the swell of her bottom lip. "P-please Jemma."

A rush of memories flooded her mind - banging on a locked lab door, a broken arm, one breath of air, an earthquake - they all came back with such a force she was almost upended. She couldn't leave him again. Not like before. If he was going down fighting, she would be his sister-in-arms. "No."

The finality in her voice must have been apparent, because his next protest died on his lips. "At least get behind me then, yeah?"

She laughed and shook her head. "That's absolutely not happening."

When Jemma looked up again, Mack was still writhing on the ground with a concerned Joey kneeling next to him. A ring of fire, roughly eight feet tall, surrounded the men like a Satanist cult ceremony, cutting off any escape. "Poor man."

Fitz squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead into her hair. "I can't look. Please tell me he's alive."

"His arm is badly damaged, but he should be okay."

Fitz relaxed only marginally.

Ward rushed back to where Fitz and Simmons were standing and placed a hand on Jemma's shoulder, which she immediately jerked away.

"I don't care what special thing you can do with your hands," Fitz shoved Jemma behind him and staggered forward. "You don't fucking touch her with them!"

With a put upon sigh, Ward grabbed Fitz's shoulder instead. "Hang onto her. This might sting a little."

Ward whistled the Mockingjay tone and out of nowhere, an older, African-American woman with a shaved head appeared next to them in a flash of azure light.

"Teleporter," Fitz whispered reverently to Jemma, under his breath. "I hate bloody teleporters."

The woman turned to him and winked before taking his chin in her hand. "You're not exactly my type either, James McAvoy."

"For your information," Fitz's eyes narrowed, "that's not an insul--"

The bald woman closed her eyes in concentration and as the blue light overtook them, the last thought Jemma had was how close the color of it matched Fitz's eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I went with turning Ward into Hellfire! I wrote this before we knew ho Hellfire was going to be, but I figure it’s a good match with the arson Ward committed at his childhood home.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> PS - I got a little (a lot) sidetracked by grad school, but I do think I’ll return to this story to complete it whenever I have a break. My deepest apologies to those of you who wanted a conclusion right away...I can only say I hate leaving things unfinished, even when years pass, so take that for what you will.


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